Destination Promotion through Images: Exploring Tourists′ Emotions and Their Impact on Behavioral Intentions

Abstract

Tourists are increasingly looking for more emotion in the promotion of destinations in order to make decisions about their holidays. Traditional promotional tools centred on images have advantages over other sensorial tools due to the consumer′s knowledge of them. Nevertheless, simultaneously, the continued use of images leads to the sophistication of the receiver, making it necessary to analyse their capacity to create emotions and their effects. The main objective of this study is to evaluate consumers′ emotional reactions to visual stimuli through conscious and unconscious responses. With a sample of 38 students, a within-subjects study is carried out to compare emotional reactions and behavioural intentions in a 2 × 3 factorial experimental design, facing two international destinations and three tourist typologies. The results show differences between the emotional values gathered in surveys and sweating data (EDA) and the relationships between these and behavioural intentions. The main contribution of this study is that, despite the emotional evocation capacity of images in young audiences, there are discrepancies in the conditions that provoke greater emotional and behavioural intentions in the different evaluation phases. The main conclusions are that it is necessary to create images that evoke conscious positive emotions to obtain better behavioural intentions results.