E-BRANDING STRATEGIES AND DEVELOPMENT OF E-COMMERCE AND TOURISM: THE CASE OF ITALIAN TOUR OPERATORS

This contribution refers to a research programme on ‘E-commerce and tourism ’ launched in 1999 at the University of Rome and articulated in various phases. The programme started with the analysis of the representational field related to “Internet and its users” in a sample of Italian navigators and in the aim to underline the salient dimensions of the semantic space. The support of specific techniques of data analysis like DiscAn allowed the identification of the dynamic of the discourse in a dictionary freely produced by the subjects responding to the ‘associative network ’ ( de Rosa, A.S. 1995). In the second phase the programme aimed at exploring the persuasive power of publicity via the Internet in comparison to the traditional channels. During this phase, Italian Internet web sites dedicated to e-commerce and tourism were evaluated both from a psychological point of view, by studying the structure and the content of the web sites, and from a technical point of view, evaluating the efficiency and the correct use of HTML with the support of Usable Net, a Web Testing System available on line