A Framework to Analyze Cultural Values in Online Tourism Visuals of European Destinations

Abstract

Images play a crucial role in inspiring and informing travelers throughout the tourism experience. Due to this, destination management/marketing organizations (DMOs) do their best to provide visually rich websites and mobile applications. Among the factors guiding online communication choices, cultural values influence the selection and use of website design and multimedia contents. While several strategies are available to measure cultural values offline and online, so far, no consistent framework has accounted for the visual style of cultural categories in the tourism domain, especially within the European context. Addressing this research gap, the aim of this article is to propose a framework for the visual analysis of cultural values in the context of European destinations, also discussing the relation among values, visual content and visual style. The final model results from the combination of existing theories of visual semiotics and cross-cultural communication with bottom-up data from the semiotic analysis of 95 pictures from UK and Portuguese DMO websites.

Analyzing cultural tourism promotion on Instagram: a cross-cultural perspective

“…Kim et al, 2011;Würtz, 2005). Within the context of the present research, following Hofstede et al's (2010) and Hall's theories and scores (Hall, 1976;Van Everdingen & Waarts, 2003 Qualitative research suggests that the expression of cultural values in tourism visuals is related to mise en scene dimensions, such as shot composition (number of people in a picture), angle and scale (Mele & Lobinger, 2018). As argued by Mele and Lobinger (2018), in terms of shot scale and composition, a prototypical example of Individualism consists of a picture showing a single subject positioned far from the viewer (long shot), as it reinforces the idea of the independence; while increased proximity (e.g., close-up shot) with multiple subjects (e.g., a family) can emphasize closeness and togetherness -which relate to Collectivism.…”

“…Within the context of the present research, following Hofstede et al's (2010) and Hall's theories and scores (Hall, 1976;Van Everdingen & Waarts, 2003 Qualitative research suggests that the expression of cultural values in tourism visuals is related to mise en scene dimensions, such as shot composition (number of people in a picture), angle and scale (Mele & Lobinger, 2018). As argued by Mele and Lobinger (2018), in terms of shot scale and composition, a prototypical example of Individualism consists of a picture showing a single subject positioned far from the viewer (long shot), as it reinforces the idea of the independence; while increased proximity (e.g., close-up shot) with multiple subjects (e.g., a family) can emphasize closeness and togetherness -which relate to Collectivism. Shot angle arguably conveys information on power relations: a low angle, with the camera pointed upwards, is likely to empower the subject of the picture in the mind of the viewer (Van Rompay et al, 2012); a high angle, with the camera pointed downwards, can lead instead to disempowerment perceptions (Bell & Milic, 2002); while an eye (horizontal) angle generally represents equality between the subject of the picture and viewer (Lin, 2008).…”

“…On the other side, research shows that Instagram is populated by self-oriented posts, following motives such as self-expression and escapism (Lee et al, 2015) within an overall individualist orientation (Ekman & Widholm, 2017). Given the relation among the cultural dimensions explained above and the presence of these contrasting influences that could affect the promotion of cultural tourism, we propose the following research question: To answer these research questions, the present study builds upon the research by Tigre Moura et al (2014), for the operationalization of the cultural dimensions, in combination with previous studies on visual content analysis in the tourism domain (Mele & Lobinger, 2018;Pan et al, 2014).…”

“…Apart from the cultural dimensions, also the image mise en scene was considered -that is, the distribution of all elements within the frame of a picture (table 3). Indeed, photographs are composed by content as well as framing (mise en scene) and both contribute to the creation of meaning (Mele & Lobinger, 2018). Addressing this topic, Neuendorf (2017) identifies two types of content with respect to its appearance: manifest and latent contentalso referred to as the denotative and connotative parts of a message.…”

“…The operationalization of mise en scene dimensions was first developed from existing research (Bordwell & Thompson, 2013;Pan et al, 2014) and then refined with a preliminary analysis on tourism Instagram posts; the same process was followed for the operationalization of cultural dimensions, which was based on previous studies (Mele & Lobinger, 2018;Tigre Moura et al, 2014) to ensure its validity to reflect these complex constructs. The most important decision that followed this step was to analyze PD and HC-LC values only for post captions.…”