Collaborare per competere nel turismo: Il ruolo del co-marketing per i tour operator

The need for speed and flexibility in responding to environmental and technological changes, and new consumer behaviors encourage companies to leave their corporate confines and integrate activities with other organizations in a stable and progressive manner, thus activating valuable cooperation processes. Indeed, the creation of alliances among companies can be a strategic option aimed to provide answers in contexts of high-level complexity, often where companies are forced to rethink strategies, build new competitive advantages and stake a different position in the market. In tourism, in particular, the high degree of complementarity among services offered by companies, being such services both upstream and downstream the production and distribution channels, makes the theme of alliances a very strategic one. Among tourism organizations that are most affected by the alliance phenomenon, there are tour operators which are traditionally the central players of the tourism industry. Within co-marketing strategic alternatives, the number of cooperating tourism-sector organizations is growing. In turn, these initiatives bring into play a very important value, perhaps a company’s most valuable asset, namely, its brand. This study aims to explore and investigate the state of the art of the co-marketing application to the tour operator industry, with particular focus on the practice of co-branding. In addition to mapping this phenomenon on the Italian market, an additional research purpose is to understand the main implementation problems of marketing alliances in the context of organized tourism, in order to shed some light on possible managerial implications in the improvement of the management and operational processes of the companies concerned. After defining the research process and framing issues related to the mixed methods research, this study proposes a review of the main international literature on co-marketing and co-branding, in order to build a concept map from which purposes, types of implementation and management mechanisms associated with them can be brought to the fore. On the basis of the findings of the first phase of our research (desk analysis), we structured a field analysis, which delves into co-marketing by using empirical data. The mixed methods research we used (Convergent parallel design) provides for the joint use of the qualitative and quantitative method, where the former supports the interpretation of the results yielded by the quantitative approach. The integration of methods coincides with the joint phase of result interpretation, after an analysis of both research perspectives.