The place of culture in the consumption behavior of tourists: A study into the tourists visiting Alanya

The success of the establishments in our era when the competition is very highdepends on both the internal Dynamics of the establishment itself and market conditionschanging in parallel to the environmental factors. Together with the technologicaladvancements in the 20th century, development of transportation and communication,increasing resources of information facilitate the Access of goods and services into themarkets, while the several factors affecting the needs of people made the marketscomplicated. The characteristics of each market are shaped with the features of theconsumers in it and this makes market segmentation more complicated and necessarythan ever. The most useful tool used to overcome this problem is the research that canshed light on the marketing activities. Hence, efficient consumer behavior research is ofgreat priority in terms of paving the way fort he success of the firm in this fiercecompetitive environment.This study dwells on the consumer behavior which reveals the market, specificdynamics for tourism industry. The reason fort his is that, since tourism is composed ofmarkets from different nationalities and cultures, it is expected that there will bedifferent approaches and behavior towards tourism market of the country underconsideration, which makes the structure of the tourism market more complicated. Thisbeing in mind, this study was planned and carried out over the Russian and Germantourist that make up the huge part of the market segment in Alanya, a popular touristdestination.The questionnaire used in the study is composed of three parts. In the first part,there are questions on demographic information; in the second part, questions on touristactivities and events. Finally, in the last part, there are 33 statements aiming todetermine the factors affecting the behavior of the tourists. The study covered 405Russian subjects in 2009 August, and the total number of the participants was 789. Thedata collected through the questionnaire were analyzed through SPSS 16 statisticalpackage software. T test was implemented for two, paired independent samples such asnationality and gender and for those more than two, ANOVA was implemented.The results of the statistical analysis suggest that the most powerful factor thatleads the consumer behavior was found out to be individual factors and then followsmarketing components than comes social, cultural components. According to t testresults, the level of influence by the three dimensions mentioned between the Russianand the German tourists is statistically different at 0,05 significance level. Besides,demographic variables such as gender, age, occupation, income and education level,were found to cause statistically significant differences according to the results of t andANOVA tests.Keywords: Consumer, Consumer Behavior, Culture, Tourism Marketing