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The first systematic attempt to establish base case data of marketing research use in tourism was undertaken in 1995. The initial intention was to replicate the most recent AMA study focusing on tourism-related organisations, and analysing the nature of the relationships between the variables derived from the AMA questionnaire.

A draft of the questionnaire was prepared. The draft included a version of the AMA marketing research questionnaire, with only the minimum alterations to make it industrially and culturally specific (i.e., for the Australian tourism industry), and a version of USER instrument. The questionnaire was tested with 10 tourism executives in informal but structured interviews. A revised version was produced and mailed to 3,200 organisations, drawing on a combination of commercial mailing lists and researcher-compiled lists. A broad coverage by tourism sector, organization size, etc., was ensured.

A response rate of 12 per cent was achieved, yielding 388 usable questionnaires for many parts of the questionnaire. The response rate of 12 per cent was similar to that achieved by Kinnear and Root (446 / 2602 = 17 per cent). Despite that, this modest response rate was considered to be a shortcoming of the study.

The Tourism 95 study served as a good inventory of marketing research activity in tourism. Seventy-four per cent of the organisations surveyed (287/388) reported using at least one of the 38 types of marketing research. A direct relationship was found between marketing research formality and the total marketing research expense, the number of marketing research employees and the total number of employees, the total revenue of the organisation, and the total number of marketing research activities performed. The sector of tourism in which the organisation operated was not related to the formality of the marketing research organisational structure or total organisational marketing research expenditure. However, sector was related to several variables, e.g., the travel sector had fewer marketing research employees and fewer employees overall, and performed fewer of the 38 marketing research activities than expected.

A major indicator of the extent of usage of marketing research, the number of the 38 named marketing research activities performed, was found to be positively associated with the formality of the marketing research organization but not the age of any marketing research department, the expenditure on marketing research internally and in total but not externally, the number of marketing research and overall organisational employees, and the organisation’s total revenue and the proportion of that revenue devoted to marketing research.

Some relationships were not as anticipated. For example, a negative relationship was found between the total revenue of an organization and its expenditure on marketing research, expressed as a percentage of that total revenue. But a positive relationship was found between an organization’s total marketing research expenditure and its total revenue. The reconciliation of these apparently contradictory results is probably that, as organizations increased in total revenue, they increased their absolute total spending on marketing research, but at a decreasing rate. Hypothetically, spending two per cent of $1 million ($20,000) is still less than one per cent of $10 million ($100,000).

When each of the 38 individual types of marketing research activity was examined, it was found that some organisational aspects were related. Higher usage of every single marketing research activity was associated with a formal marketing research department and more marketing research employees, higher total marketing research expenditure, larger annual revenue, and more staff overall. Interestingly, industry sector was not a good predictor. And the degree of ‘outsourcing’, or the conducting of marketing research by outsiders, was not always related. That is, it may have been hypothesized that small firms or low marketing research users would contract marketing research out, but it seemed that a wide range of firms outsource to a widely varying extent. (For a full discussion of the results of Tourism 95, see Yaman and Shaw 1998.)

This initial study demonstrated that tourism organisations were not dissimilar to organisations in general in their approach to knowledge acquisition. Tourism organisations devoted substantial resources to the conduct of marketing research, and performed many different types of marketing research. Further, the results indicated substantial variation within the set of tourism organisations regarding most aspects of

marketing research.

However, the variables derived from the questionnaire tended to be rather global, and mainly of value for broad comparisons. While there may seem to be a lot of detail inherent in a list of 38 types of marketing research activities, simply knowing that most organisations claim to perform advertising effectiveness research, actually said very little. For example, who initiated the research, designed it, executed it, and analysed the results, and why? Which marketing research techniques were used, and why? What was the history of the organisations’ experience with these projects, including their evaluation of them? How did organisations justify marketing research, initially, and monitor its execution, and assess its implementation and effect on financial performance? What was it about innovative marketing research techniques that influenced their diffusion within the tourism system?