Value-creating Digital Marketing Practices in Inbound Tour Operators in Ethiopia: the Mediating Role of Practitioner Enactment and Praxis
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Date
2025-06-28
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A.A.U
Abstract
This study explores how Ethiopia's inbound tour operators (ITOs) adapt digital marketing
practices to create business value in the face of changing global tourism system dynamics and
competitive challenges. While digital marketing is paramount to improving competitiveness,
there remains limited understanding of how practitioners in emerging economies adapt these
practices to their specific organizational and environmental contexts. Building on the
Marketing-as-Practice (MAP) framework, the Resource-Based-View (RBV), and the
Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) model, the study uses a mixed-methods
approach. It combines SMARTPLS-based quantitative analysis with qualitative interviews, to
consider how digital marketing practices are shaped by internal and external contextual
factors. The study shows that, while technological, organizational, environmental and human
competence contexts all significantly shape practitioner behaviour, they are mediated through,
and translated by, practitioners’ enactment and praxis, which ultimately drive value creation.
Practices relating to social media engagement, CRM integration, and content creation can
generate value when meaningfully informed by proactive and context-sensitive enactments by
practitioners, while outmoded tools, skill gaps and cultural resistance serve to prevent success.
The findings challenge traditional linear models, highlighting the central role of agency in
practitioners’ ability to leverage digital resources, and help to contribute to advancing theory
on marketing praxis and digital transformation in tourism. Practical recommendations for
augmenting human capital, fostering digital innovation and improving the competitiveness of
Ethiopia’s inbound tourism sector are provided.