The impact of direct marketing on business growth in Ghana‟s tourism industry. The mediating role of social media adoption.
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Date
2017-10
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KNUST
Abstract
Ghana‟s tourism industry is in a stage of stagnant growth and structurally defective which has affected the numerous anticipated growth opportunities needed to boost the county‟s economy. Nevertheless, academically, studies examined and addressed the constructs of direct marketing, social media adoption and growth independently and studies explaining the causal relationships among direct marketing, social media adoption and tourism growth are lacking. The study used quantitative research approach and sampled 390 respondents through quota and convenience sampling technique. Survey questionnaires were employed in the gathering of data from four destinations in Ghana. The data were analysed using structural equational model. The results of the study revealed a positive and significant relationship between direct marketing and business growth and significantly direct positive effect of direct marketing on social media adoption. In addition, there existed a significant positive effect of social media adoption on business growth. The effect of social media adoption on the relationship between direct marketing and business growth showed a significantly positive result. However, after testing for mediation, it was revealed that the mediator (social media adoption) partially mediates the relationship between direct marketing and business growth. Based on these findings, it was recommended that destination managers should make a conscious effort to build and improve upon its marketing efforts by leveraging on the various social media handles, also, destination managers should create a link between destination‟s website to its social media handles in order to facilitate relationship and database building and finally, the proposed model was accepted after SEM was ran.
Description
A thesis submitted to the Department of Marketing and Corporate Strategy,
School of Business, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, KNUST in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Business Administration (marketing option)