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Drawing upon Baudrillard’s concept of sign-value, this study aims to investigate consumer behavior and sign perception in visitor attractions.

By adopting netnography, 133 customer-to-customer reviews sourced from TripAdvisor were analyzed regarding visitors’ online post-visit impressions.

The findings reveal that netnography contributes to a deeper understanding of sign consumption and sign promotion and examines how visitors attribute symbolic meanings to their experience in Titanic Belfast.

The findings show that the co-creation and reevaluation of the visitor experience through consumers’ online reviews should be taken into account by both managers and marketers. Furthermore, advertising should avoid creating excessive expectations to visitors to decrease the possibility of negative disconfirmation, which can be easily and instantly spread online. Another implication concerns the winning awards of visitor attractions, hotels and restaurants of a destination which may be used as a basis of co-branding marketing campaigns to enhance destination brand image.

This study continues the debate on the commodification of the visitor experience and the commercialization of visitor attractions.

This paper provides better understanding of sign-value, sign consumption and sign promotion in the visitor attraction sector.

Retro-marketing is rampant. Throwback branding is burgeoning. Newstalgia is the next big thing. Yet marketing thinking is dominated by the forward-facing discourse of innovation. The purpose of this paper is to challenge innovation’s rhetorical hegemony by making an exemplar-based case for renovation.

If hindsight is the new foresight, then historical analyses can help us peer through a glass darkly into the future. This paper turns back time to the RMS Titanic, once regarded as the epitome of innovation, and offers a qualitative, narratological, culturally informed reading of a much-renovated brand.

In narrative terms, Titanic is a house of many mansions. Cultural research reveals that renovation and innovation, far from being antithetical, are bound together in a deathless embrace, like steamship and iceberg. It shows that, although the luxury liner sank more than a century ago, Titanic is a billion-dollar brand and a testament to renovation’s place in marketing’s pantheon. It contends that the unfathomable mysteries of the Titanic provide an apt metaphor for back-to-the-future brand management. It is a ship-shape simile heading straight for the iceberg called innovation. Survival is unlikely but the collision is striking.

This paper makes no claims to originality. On the contrary, it argues that originality is overrated. Renovation, rather, rules the waves. It is a time to renovate our thinking about innovation. The value of this paper inheres in that observation.

The purpose of this study is to raise the issue of contemporary retromania with marketing historians.

This is a reflective essay combining personal experiences with empirical exemplars.

It is found that retromarketing is a subject requiring scholarly scrutiny. The commodification of the past is increasingly prevalent and marketing historians are ideally placed to lead the discussion.

As yestermania is unlikely to evaporate anytime soon, it provides rich, socially and managerially relevant pickings for marketing historians.

Aside from the scurrilous suggestion that historians should get out of the dusty archives, it argues that originality is overrated.

Purpose – To explore the nature of metaphorical thinking in marketing and consumer research, with particular emphasis on consumers’ metaphor-manufacturing proclivities.

Methods/approach – The chapter concentrates on one of the most compelling and powerful metaphors of the 20th century, the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912. It uses introspective methods to interrogate consumers’ figurative interpretations of the iconic catastrophe.

Findings – Four categories of consumer metaphor-making are identified: negative, positive, reflexive and visual.

Research implications – The profusion of Titanic tropes suggests that researchers should resist unearthing ‘deep’ metaphors and focus instead on ‘wide’ metaphors, those that spread across the surface of society and culture.

Practical implications – ZMET, the widely used metaphorical elicitation procedure, warrants a complement called TMET. This Titanic Metaphor Elaboration Tendency is better attuned to contemporary branding thinking than its more familiar predecessor.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Delve into current business literature and it is almost impossible to escape assertions about the importance of such as leadership, globalization and sustainability. Certain other words and phrases appear with similar frequency. Innovation can claim to be the daddy of them all though. Any discussion about organizational growth and success does not progress far without mentioning the inimitable “i” word. Being able to develop and implement novel ideas is widely regarded as essential if any competitive edge is to be attained. If you believe everything you read, take innovation out of the game and achievements of any real note will remain elusive. Creativity is touted as being the game-breaker that is able to set an organization apart from its rivals.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate researchers’ understanding of place in general and psychogeography in particular.

Melding hauntology, autoethnography, pseudo-psychogeography and object-orientated ontology, the provocation explores aspects of east Belfast’s “C.S. Lewis Trail”.

Psychogeography, purportedly, is moribund. This provocation contends that latter-day developments in virtual reality, augmented reality, digital real estate platforms and “imaginary worlds” more generally, open up new horizons, and offer more opportunities, for the psychogeographically inclined.

The provocation’s originality inheres in the approach adopted not the research findings.

Artist residencies comprise a unique accommodation type and a form of cultural entrepreneurship which remains overlooked from a hospitality perspective. This exploratory study aims to examine the phenomenon of artist residencies as specialist accommodation, as well as their operators’ motives as cultural entrepreneurs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Creation theory is used to explore how artist residency operators create entrepreneurial opportunities.

Asynchronous email interviews were conducted with 20 artist residency operators from 18 countries. Purposive sampling was used to select interviewees and thematic analysis to analyze the primary data.

The results showed that with few exceptions, artist residencies address all criteria of specialist accommodation, and that social interactions among artists and operators are fundamental in running an artist residency. From a cultural entrepreneurship perspective, most of the operators declared that their priorities were to promote artistic creativity and cultural knowledge exchange, confirming the main elements of creation theory.

Managerial implications are discussed to enhance the resilience of artist residencies and strengthen their financial viability, as well as to support them to overcome the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study extends the hospitality literature by adding the artist residencies to the existing types of specialist accommodation. It also examines creation theory and concludes that artistic creativity and cultural networks are prominent in artist residency entrepreneurial activities.