Industrial Tourism and Literary Tourism: Niche Marketing Perspective and Regional Development

Introduction

Tourists increasingly resort to the Internet, particularly websites, review channels and social networks, as their main source of information (Almeida-Santana and Moreno-Gil, 2017; Clark et al., 2023). Resultantly, all these platforms can influence the perception and image of a particular destination, business or brand (Foroudi et al., 2018; Vinyals-Mirabent et al., 2019). Digital media have democratized the access to forms of promotion with a widespread universal reach. Nevertheless, although low-density and urban destinations currently have access to the same communication sources to promote themselves, urban destinations have a greater awareness of the potential of digital media (Correia et al., 2023). According to Tajeddini and Ratten (2017), in the last two decades, brand management has generated much interest both in academic and business circles and branding strategy has been widely recognised as a source of sustainable competitive advantage (Lubowiecki-Vikuk & Sousa, 2021). Segmentation and niche tourism have been asserting itself in recent decades and is strongly associated with the theory of niche marketing (Sousa et al., 2020). Tourism, as an area of study, has expanded its scope, reflecting a growing recognition in the academic community, parallel to the application of interdisciplinary concepts and methods. In fact, tourism research has studied its various implications from a multitude of perspectives and with interdisciplinary perceptions. In this context, niche tourism can be considered an alternative, almost the antithesis of modern mass tourism (for example, literary tourism services) (Sousa et al., 2023; Figueiredo et al., 2024). In this context, Sousa et al. (2022) argues that the growing global competitiveness, the need to innovate and the desire to make a difference are at the origin of the progressive segmentation of the tourism market. This leads, therefore, to the diversification and multiplicity of tourist products. We easily find activities and / or products considered as specific interest tourism (Nair & Mohanty, 2021; Trauer, 2006). According to Otay Demir et al. (2022), sentiments and emotions are created for cities in literary texts; certain assets of cities are emphasized consistently as well. That’s why, literary texts have the potential to create a desire to visit the city for the readers. Computational literary techniques offer opportunities for diagnosing sentimental, emotional and topic-based content in literary texts which can be used to enhance insight development for successful destination marketing. Some Special Forms of Tourism (SFT) are the result of technological developments. SFT can be operated both on a first level, through a network of small companies (tour operators, hotels, etc.), making use of low barriers to entry, characteristics of the tourism industry, and employing information technologies as a form of “home industry”, as at another level, on a larger scale, through transnational companies, using highly developed specialist systems that can provide a greater variety of tourism products and tourism services (e.g. literary tourism and industrial tourism) (Badia et al., 2024; Otay Demir, Yavuz Görkem & Rafferty, 2022; Bujok, Klempa, Jelinek, Porzer & Rodriguez Gonzalez, 2015). For instance, Badia et al. (2024), developed a study with the objective to analyze the opportunities and potential of industrial tourism for the agri-food industry in the current post-pandemic scenario. Industrial tourism can favor appropriate behaviors by companies and tourists to address emerging challenges in the post-pandemic era, such as responsible production and consumption and the containment of waste production. Though prior research has addressed the role of virtual reality (VR) in tourism, the dynamics and consequences characterizing tourists’ VR-based brand engagement, which has grown significantly since the pandemic, remain tenuous, as, therefore, explored in this research (Rather et al., 2023). This chapter develops the existing research since it discusses the growing phenomena of literary and industrial tourism and the perspective of relationship marketing. Based on the literature review, we propose a model that connects the dimensions of relationship marketing (that is, commitment, trust, and cooperation) with the consequent satisfaction with the segments and the behavioral intention to repeat the experience or reinforce the experience with a marketing focused on tourist motivation (and, cumulatively, leisure).