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Many companies struggle with the assessment of customer experience. This chapter aims to demonstrate how mobile ethnography tackles this issue by assessing data in a holistical way, in-situ, and in real-time.

The chapter describes the implementation of a mobile ethnography project in a tourist destination, including participant recruitment, data collection, data analysis, and the derivation of insights.

The mobile ethnography project allowed to gain deep insights into the customers’ journeys.

Future research will need to further investigate questions of participant recruitment, the effectiveness of incentives as well as the performance of the data collection process. Furthermore the findings of this case need to be replicated in the context of other industries, as well as in other cultural contexts.

Mobile ethnography allows companies to gain more information on customer experience in real-time, thus with reduced cognitive and emotional bias. Therefore, the method can help to improve the touristic service offering and, consequently, customer experience.

As companies are searching for new approaches to research and manage customer experience, this chapter is of high value for both academia and practice.

Market research and insight generation is the art of unifying relevant pieces of information when formulating the solution to a puzzle. The present chapter contributes to the market research industry and the literature on research methods by providing a detailed snapshot of the current state of the industry in Turkey, as an emerging market, together with the future outlook. The comprehensive review in convergence with expert precepts elucidates the transformation of the industry. In the last decade, the world has witnessed a digital revolution that has affected the way in which research is conducted, and the identity of the storyteller. The consumer is the principal actor, and researchers assume the roles of co-creators and curators who are responsible for combining different forms of data. The new roles have changed the perception of the term market research and have generated new labels to denote business in the digital era. From the study, conclusions can also be drawn regarding the impact of technology and new methods upon research designs. New technologies are inspirational; they raise the industry to a higher level and allow researchers spend their time, energy and resources on the interpretation of data rather than on the gathering process. Consequently, the role of the researcher is to understand people, and hence the eternal principles of marketing research remain valid even in this new era. Professionals are expected to be courageous in their decisions and to be agile leaders who will be active participants in the transformation process of the discipline.

The purposes of this chapter are to propose definitions of innovation, product innovation, business model innovation, marketing innovation, innovation strategy, and strategic innovation, elaborate on their literature and conceptual underpinnings, and provide an overview of the conceptual domains of innovation, innovation strategy, and strategic innovation.

First, certain definitions of innovation, drawn from literature, are presented. Next, certain definitions that incorporate logically incremental refinements in them are presented. Building on these, definitions of innovation, product innovation, business model innovation, and marketing innovation are proposed.

Innovation is the creation of value by using relevant knowledge and resources for conversion of an idea into a new product, process, or practice, or improvements in an existing product, process, or practice. Innovation strategy is an organization’s relative emphasis on different types of innovations and the associated pattern of resource allocation, in alignment with its strategy at the corporate and business unit levels. Strategic innovation is the creation of value by using relevant knowledge and resources for conversion of an idea into a new product, process, or practice with the potential to have a major transformational effect on the evolution of markets and industries.

Over the past several decades, there has been a sustained and high level of interest in issues relating to innovation among academics in a number of disciplines, business and social entrepreneurs, business practitioners, and policy makers. Books, journal articles, and business magazine articles provide a number of definitions of innovation and specific types of innovation. Multiple definitions of a construct can be problematic in certain respects and beneficial in other respects. A potential upside of multiple definitions of innovation is the prospect of each being a source of ideas for one or more innovations that benefit society, and an impetus for research focusing on specific questions.

Implementation of an idea, value creation, and use of relevant knowledge and resources are used as constituent elements in the proposed definitions of innovation, product innovation, business model innovation, marketing innovation, and strategic innovation.

Remote communities often face a range of problems related to distance, service provision, high costs, and economic uncertainty. Many of these problems are structural and a direct result of their location on a periphery. In recent decades many remote settlements have looked to the tourism sector to supplement existing local economies. Numerous tools variously described in the literature as theories, models, and frameworks have been suggested as approaches for assisting local economies develop tourism. In searching for solutions, it is not unusual for researchers to advocate a standalone theory, model, or framework as a preferred approach. However, this method ignores the complexity of the real world and that solutions usually require a multidimensional approach based on combining various theoretical tools. This paper proposes an open architecture approach that utilizes a number of theories and models that can be selectively and collectively used to assist remote settlements develop a tourism sector. This approach was tested in Cooktown, Australia. One outcome was the identification of a range of deficiencies in the strategies currently used by the destination.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the orientations of consumer and company participants who participate in online crowd-sourced communities.

Methodology/Approach – Using a netnographic approach, we analysed the Nokia Design by Community (NDbC) crowd-sourced information contest, which was organised by Nokia in order to co-create a vision of the community's ‘dream’ Nokia device.

Findings – The findings reveal that community members' social orientations were dramatically different from the host organisation's narrow commercial focus, which led to unresolved tensions and as we posit, the ultimate failure of the initiative.

Research implications – The contemporary discourse on collaborative value co-creation potentially overemphasises the commercial objectives of organisations by failing to acknowledge the need for organisations to address the complex communal objectives and motivations of members of crowd-sourced communities.

Practical implications – Organisations need to acknowledge and address the complex and dynamic communal and commercial tensions that inherently emerge in online crowd-sourced communities. They need to adopt a tribal marketing approach and respectfully engage with community members if the diverse objectives of community members and the host organisations are to be satisfactorily met.

Originality/Value – Organisations and researchers need to recognise and acknowledge that crowdsourcing both begets communal conflict and fosters collaborative behaviour due to contested commercial and social orientations. While mindful of their commercial objectives, organisations will succeed in implementing online crowd-sourcing initiatives if they make a sincere effort to understand and respect the diversity, culture and social norms of the particular crowd-sourced online community concerned.

This chapter renews the thought on conceptualizing customer experience (CX) through the perspective of customer knowledge management (CKM). It bridges two pathways: Tacit Knowledge and Lived experience of the customer. Hence, refreshing the CX conceptualization aims to grasp the depths of the in situ service lived experience by examining the tacit knowledge forms issued from the lived experience of the client-curist in the well-being tourism. Dealing primarily with the consumption of service experience into the thalassotherapy centers is already an uphill task. This is due to its subtle and embedded experiential nature. Notwithstanding these challenges, it offers substantial knowledge about the conceptualized customer experiential knowledge (CEK). Hence, a generation of a pool of items measuring the customer experiential knowledge-process competence construct (CEK-PC) comes to begin the empirical development of the customer experiential knowledge management (CEKM) approach (as developed by Jaziri, 2013, 2019a). It also offers empirical evidence that corroborates CEK conceptualization (Jaziri-Bouagina, 2017). Through the CEK-PC, this chapter explores the competence of management levels in adopting a phenomenological vision and a global approach of ethnography to acquire CEK for treating, sharing, and using it to implement an experience-based innovation. The thrust of the construct was preserved via the Q-sort technique that has assessed the content validity through two sorting rounds. Forty-two items are retained representing a first step of the measure development.

This chapter argues that substantial potential exists for service encounter-based innovation in tourism. However, there are also a number of obstacles. Based on theoretical discussions on potentials and obstacles, a Knowledge Chain Model of service encounter-based innovation in tourism is developed. It suggests how weak or broken knowledge chains limit companies’ potential for benefiting from service encounter-based innovation. The relevance of the model is illustrated by a comparative case study of four tourism companies. In light of the theoretical frameworks and empirical findings, the chapter suggests how experimental methods can join research and practice to enhance the innovative potential of tourism companies while providing the research community with valuable knowledge.