From mass marketing to personalized digital marketing in tourism: a 2050 horizon paper

Purpose The academic background of tourism marketing dates back to the 1960s. There had been a slight increase in its capacity until the early 1990s. However, since then, it has boomed, reaching thousands of scientific journal articles and tens of scientific books published only in English each year. Therefore, this study aims to present how tourism marketing has progressed academically within the past 60 years over four waves and how this progress may move forward as the next wave. Design/methodology/approach A bibliometric analysis grounds this study, which characterizes the past and present of tourism marketing research and anticipates the future. Content analysis, such as word clouds and social network analysis, was adopted to identify topic clusters and their connections. A total of 9,239 articles published between 1969 and 2024 were extracted from Scopus. Software packages such as VOSviewer were used to determine connections within topics. Findings The authors have assessed the findings broadly. Four waves were from the late 1960s to the first quarter of 2000. In spite of the limited size of papers at the early stage, the last wave saw a boom and a diversified number and category of subjects studied. In each wave, new subjects were added to broaden the picture. Research limitations/implications The discussion of findings is based only on those scientific papers published in English since 1969 but excludes the whole list of textbooks. Subsequent research should also consider all papers and textbooks released in different languages to have the broadest picture assessment worldwide. Practical implications The study conveys various suggestions for industry practitioners and policymakers to focus on carefully assessing trends in marketing tourism services and how these may be shaped shortly. This may help practitioners and policymakers redesign their services and marketing strategies in light of future developments. Originality/value This study continues a recent study published by Kozak (2023) that has been elaborated, particularly from the industry perspective. The current study examines the academic profile of all subjects investigated in the case of tourism marketing, but mainly in an academic sense. Accordingly, this paper outlines the facts and trends researchers may follow throughout the research frame published in the past six decades.