Exploring advertising effectiveness of tourist hotels' marketing images containing nature and performing arts: An eye-tracking analysis

The beautiful, natural environment in a tourist hotel’s marketing images can evoke relaxing and soothing emotions. However, can tourist hotels use nature as a servicescape to make their performing arts services more attractive? Based on attention restoration and servicescape theory, this study explores and compares the influence of tourist hotels’ performing arts images with nature- or built-based servicescapes on the advertising effectiveness (i.e., customer visual attention and behavioral intention). To analyze visual attention on the marketing images, this study uses eye-tracking technology to record customer visual trajectories. This experiment used a total of 113 participants. The sample size of the nature-based servicescape group was 59 (age with mean = 39.04), and that of the built-based servicescape group was 54 (age with mean = 40.17). A tourist hotel’s (Volando Urai Spring Spa & Resort) marketing images were chosen as stimuli. All participants were randomly assigned to the nature-based or the built-based servicescape group. In each experimental group, all the images were randomly presented to reduce any order effects of the images. By using eye-tracking analysis, the experimental findings were as follows: (1) A nature-based servicescape can arouse more visual attention of customers than a built-based servicescape can; (2) Marketing images with performing arts activities in nature-based servicescapes attract the visual attention of customers; (3) Nature-based servicescapes stimulate higher behavioral intentions of consumers than built-based servicescape.