Online Marketing Synergy Combining self-reported and real-time data to examine the effect of user-generated keywords and emotions for a tourism campaign

This research explores the user emotional states, searched keywords and intention to visit a promoted touristic place, after being exposed in different types of a social media tourism campaign, ‘Pure New Zealand’. Sixty-one users participated in the exploratory study, divided into 3 groups. The first group saw a video campaign, the second a set of images and the third both. Face tracking tools were used to monitor the user emotional levels of valence and arousal, while a post-task self-reported measure collected information about the user-generated keywords, their intention to visit New Zealand, and their perceived emotional states. Later we compared the results between the two selected research tools. The results indicated that: a) users scored higher emotional levels when using the self-reported tool than the real time data counterparts, b) user subjected to the combined ad treatment elicited significantly higher arousal levels than the other groups. Based on the keywords discovery results, this study also c) proposes a process of dividing keywords to easier discover associations between campaign-based keywords and user’s intent. For the last part, we can argue that the 100% Pure New Zealand initiative matched 37% of keywords reported by our participants