CREATING CUSTOMER-CENTRIC EXPERIENCES: Winter Activity for Chinese Tourists in Rovaniemi

Visit Lapland Tours Ltd is a destination management company, freshly established in 2018. The company remains in the process of building a firm foundation regarding market research as well as product development. This thesis focused on the analysis of discovering China being the target market and exploring their consumption behaviour to propose a suitable activity for the Chinese tourists during the winter season in Rovaniemi. The research was conducted by qualitative method. The goal of the thesis was to improve company sales and secure income generation. At the beginning, the research covered the market situation in Lapland and Rovaniemi to support the target market determination process. After the statistics have been examined, it brought the research to a decision-making process between China and Britain being the target market. The thesis applied Bhasin’s theories to determine the target market for the commissioner based on market growth, profitability and competitiveness. As a result, China became the target market for the commissioner. Thereafter, having determined the main segment, the retrieved information from interviews with experienced workers and owners in tourism firms in Rovaniemi were combined with articles on the Chinese tourists’ consumption behaviour. Subsequently, a customer persona of a Chinese tourist was created. Applying the “Design Thinking Process” and “Experience Pyramid”, all resulted in a tourism activity creation. The invented experience covered the needs of the Chinese tourists and excluded the unnecessaries from the tourists’ perspective