Eye movement patterns reveal the pleasure derived tourist advertising

Abstract

The growth of new technologies along with the advancement of neuroscience techniques/ instruments/tools are allowing, both academic and marketing experts/professionals, for a better understanding of consumer behaviour in tourism communication. The study focused on visual effects in different tourism advertisements. In detail, the aim of this study is to determine the effectiveness of neuroscientific techniques on the attentional evaluations in this context. With the intention of achieving this end, a mixed experiment with eye-tracking technologies and self-administered questionnaires was conducted. The results showed that individual’s eye gazes determine the greater acceptance of the advertisement by the participants. In other words, the eye gaze repetition in a heterogene-ous group could indicate that a specific advertisement is able to hold the attention more efficiently than others. This study got a support to the use of technology applications for measuring visual attentional behaviours in advertising. Likewise, findings suggest that the applied research on tourism could improve through the use of a “pre-neuroassessment” to foster the future advertisement creation. Finally, the present study shows the first preliminary data of a larger project.