The Prentice - O'Gorman destination appraisal matrix for tourism development and marketing

We ask how tourists are thought to make decisions in choosing a destination to visit. The traditional approach emphasised the sequence by which possible destinations were rejected. Prentice's ideas, instead, emphasise the processes of choosing. His approach offers information about why a destination is chosen and why other destinations are rejected by potential tourists. This is a basis from which tourism developers and marketers can predict the needs of tourists. Central to the approach are USPs (Unique Selling Points) and SSPs (Standardised Selling Points). SSPs have lead to the creation of many look-a-like destinations throughout the Mediterranean, a process described by the French as banalisation. We offer instead an approach to defining USPs designed to capture the authenticity of place and the sincerity of cultures. In doing so, the paper considers what tourists are seeking in products, in terms of utilities, experiences and symbols. It also considers how contemporary tourism products are created to achieve this. The presentation is illustrated using examples from the United Kingdom, to demonstrate how culture and commercialism can be sensitively combined to assist tourists in developing their feelings of authenticity and sincerity. The final section of the paper considers how planners and marketers should capture the sense of place and culture as USPs. A destination appraisal matrix is provided combining an analysis of USPs with a traditional SWOT analysis. The paper is concluded by demonstrating the matrix with a hypothetical example, which some people might assume to be London

The Prentice-O'Gorman destination appraisal matrix: Iranian case study

Prentice's model was designed to challenge a tendency in contemporary destination marketing to emphasise SSPs (Standardised Selling Points) rather than USPs (Unique (or at least Unusual) Selling Points). This process of standardisation is what the French have termed Banalisation (Prentice 2006b). Prentice's model is a hybrid of traditional destination choice sets models (Crompton 1992; Sirakaya and Woodside 2005) with inputs from the Theory of Reasoned Action (Aizen and Fishbein 1980) and from heuristic choice models (Pham 1998). Prentice further differentiates USPs into UUSPs (Unique Utility Selling Points) UESPs (Unique Experiential Selling Points) USSPs (Unique Symbolic Selling Points). These may be thought of as summarising those aspects of generic imagery and product beliefs that are pertinent to destination differentiation. As specified, Prentice's model is a model of choosing on the part of potential tourists. The question arises as to how destination managers may readily operationalise Prentice's ideas in both their marketing and market based product development or, indeed, simply to think about their destination. Many managers are familiar with SWOT analysis and the operationalisation of Prentice's ideas suggested here builds on this familiarity. The demonstrated means of application is in the form of a matrix combining Prentice's expansion of USPs with a traditional SWOT analysis

Iranian hospitality : from caravanserai to bazaar to reporting symbolic experience

This paper reports case studies seeking to address one of the great problems of social science: namely, the extent to which is it possible or desirable accurately to report conscious experience (Hulburt & Scwitzgebel 2007). An interpretive ethnographic approach is used to address this problem. Caravanserais and bazaars in Iran have always offered multi-sensual experiences and represented aspects of symbolic interaction, as well as facilitating physical exchange, between travellers and locals. This is true in their origins, in their nineteenth and twentieth century usage, and in their contemporary roles which increasingly include heritage tourism accommodation or heritage retailing. Using two case studies the paper explores the role that hospitality has played and shows that it has been fundamental to their evolution and remains so, particularly for the commercial caravanserais and tea houses which now exist as refurbished heritage accommodation and restaurants

الگوي ارزيابي و انتخاب مقاصد توريستي پرنتايس-اگرمن Iranian applications of the Prentice - O'Gorman destination appraisal matrix for tourism

We ask how tourists are thought to make decisions in choosing a destination to visit. The traditional approach emphasised the sequence by which possible destinations were rejected. Prentice's ideas, instead, emphasise the processes of choosing. His approach offers information about why a destination is chosen and why other destinations are rejected by potential tourists. This is a basis from which tourism developers and marketers can predict the needs of tourists. Central to the approach are USPs (Unique Selling Points) and SSPs (Standardised Selling Points). SSPs have lead to the creation of many look-a-like destinations throughout the Mediterranean, a process described by the French as banalisation. We offer instead an approach to defining USPs designed to capture the authenticity of place and the sincerity of cultures. In doing so, the paper considers what tourists are seeking in products, in terms of utilities, experiences and symbols. It also considers how contemporary tourism products are created to achieve this. The presentation is illustrated using examples from the United Kingdom, to demonstrate how culture and commercialism can be sensitively combined to assist tourists in developing their feelings of authenticity and sincerity. The final section of the paper considers how planners and marketers should capture the sense of place and culture as USPs. A destination appraisal matrix is provided combining an analysis of USPs with a traditional SWOT analysis. The paper is concluded by demonstrating the matrix with a hypothetical example, which some people might assume to be London

Synthesis of empty bacterial microcompartments, directed organelle protein incorporation, and evidence of filament-associated organelle movement

Compartmentalization is an important process, since it allows the segregation of metabolic activities and, in the era of synthetic biology, represents an important tool by which defined microenvironments can be created for specific metabolic functions. Indeed, some bacteria make specialized proteinaceous metabolic compartments called bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) or metabolosomes. Here we demonstrate that the shell of the metabolosome (representing an empty BMC) can be produced within E. coil cells by the coordinated expression of genes encoding structural proteins. A plethora of diverse structures can be generated by changing the expression profile of these genes, including the formation of large axial filaments that interfere with septation. Fusing GFP to PduC, PduD, or PduV, none of which are shell proteins, allows regiospecific targeting of the reporter group to the empty BMC. Live cell imaging provides unexpected evidence of filament-associated BMC movement within the cell in the presence of Pdu

Retinal adaptation to spatial correlations

The classical center-surround retinal ganglion cell receptive field is thought to remove the strong spatial correlations in natural scenes, enabling efficient use of limited bandwidth. While early studies with drifting gratings reported robust surrounds (Enroth-Cugell and Robson, 1966), recent measurements with white noise reveal weak surrounds (Chichilnisky and Kalmar, 2002). This might be evidence for dynamical weakening of the retinal surround in response to decreased spatial correlations, which would be predicted by efficient coding theory. Such adaptation is reported in LGN (Lesica et al., 2007), but whether the retina also adapts to correlations is unknown. 

We tested for adaptation by recording simultaneously from ~40 ganglion cells on a multi-electrode array while presenting white and exponentially correlated checkerboards and strips. Measuring from ~200 cells responding to 90 minutes each of white and correlated stimuli, we were able to extract precise spatiotemporal receptive fields (STRFs). We found that a difference-of-Gaussians was not a good fit and the surround was generally displaced from the center. Thus, to assess surround strength we found the center and surround regions and the total weight on the pixels in each region. The relative surround strength was then defined as the ratio of surround weight to center weight. Surprisingly, we found that the majority of recorded cells have a stronger surround under white noise than under correlated noise (p<.05), contrary to naive expectation from theory. The conclusion was robust to different methods of extracting STRFs and persisted with checkerboard and strip stimuli.

To test, without assuming a model, whether the retina decorrelates stimuli, we also measured the pairwise correlations between spike trains of simultaneously recorded neurons under three conditions: white checkerboard, exponentially correlated noise, and scale-free noise. The typical amount of pairwise correlation increased with extent of input correlation, in line with our STRF measurements

Remote sensing in Michigan for land resource management

The Environmental Research Institute of Michigan is conducting a program whose goal is the large-scale adoption, by both public agencies and private interests in Michigan, of NASA earth-resource survey technology as an important aid in the solution of current problems in resource management and environmental protection. During the period from June 1975 to June 1976, remote sensing techniques to aid Michigan government agencies were used to achieve the following major results: (1) supply justification for public acquisition of land to establish the St. John's Marshland Recreation Area; (2) recommend economical and effective methods for performing a statewide wetlands survey; (3) assist in the enforcement of state laws relating to sand and gravel mining, soil erosion and sedimentation, and shorelands protection; (4) accomplish a variety of regional resource management actions in the East Central Michigan Planning and Development Region. Other tasks on which remote sensing technology was used include industrial and school site selection, ice detachment in the Soo Harbor, grave detection, and data presentation for wastewater management programs

Aspects of the analysis of multivariative failure time data

Multivariate failure time data arise in various forms including recurrent event data when individuals are followed to observe the sequence of occurrences of a certain type of event; correlated failure time when an individual is followed for the occurrence of two or more types of events for which the individual is simultaneously at risk, or when distinct individuals have dependent event times; or more complicated multistate processes when individuals may move among a number of discrete states over the course of a follow-up study and the states and associated sojourn times are recorded. Here we provide a critical review of statistical models and data analysis methods for the analysis of recurrent event data and correlated failure time data. This review suggests a valuable role for partially marginalized intensity models for the analysis of recurrent event data, and points to the usefulness of marginal hazard rate models and nonparametric estimates of pairwise dependencies for the analysis of correlated failure times. Areas in need of further methodology development are indicated