ABSTRACT
When the American Marketing Association launched its Journal of Marketing Research in 1963, it triggered off what is nowadays called the ‘multivariate revolution’ in marketing. It took about a decade for marketing researchers to discover the intriguing application area of tourism that poses plenty of challenges for advanced analytical methods. Table 14.1 highlights the most prominent analytical tasks together with conventional and nonstandard methods encountered in these fi elds of marketing decision making. Nontrivial methods are instrumental for decision-support since the analyst must come to terms with problems such as data reduction for purifying redundant observations, qualitative variables, latent constructs and multiple indicators, ambiguity in the direction of causality, unobserved heterogeneity, nonlinearity or multicollinearity. Given these intricacies the need for advanced analytical methods is apparent and the investigation may proceed with highlighting the actual method use in tourism marketing research.
