Elena Domínguez Romero
Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
elenadominguez@filol.ucm.es 

 

 

Dissecting the Mythical Perception of Spain: A Heuristic

Processing System in Advertising

 

 

Abstract: This paper unveils the role of heuristic processing in the ideation of those myths and stereotypes that have been involved in the design of the Spanish country brand. The heuristic processes that will get into focus in the present study are (i) representativeness, (ii) availability and (iii) anchoring-adjustment. Heuristics play a central role in the creation and development of myths and stereotypes since they are based on the perception―one’s own of that of others―of a number of key variables such as natural resources, quality products and leisure potential. These premises made, the ultimate goal of this paper is to analyze the role that heuristics have had in the evolution of the Spanish myth through the approach to different campaigns launched by TURESPAÑA.

Keywords: Heuristic Processing; Stereotypes; Myth; Spanish Country Brand.

 

 

 

Introduction

 

The external image of a country is related to the position of power of that country in the world, what makes tourist advertising a necessary element to activate national economy. This illustrates the important link between image formation and positioning that can be appreciated in Table 1. below:

 

Table 1. World top country brand positions.[1]

 

 

 

It is evident that the tourist promotion in the foreign markets is a key instrument to develop the image of a country. As stated by Claire Pot, the marketing of a tourism destination has as objective “to alter the existing image held by the target market segments so that it fits more closely with the destination’s desired position.”[2] “The key challenge is to create that special appealing and distinctive image in the minds of prospective tourist relative to key competitors that are in accordance with the actual experiences that can be had in the destination.”[3]

National governments are conscious of this potential of tourism for enhancing a country’s trade performance.[4] Though not occupying the top positions in Table 1 above, Spain is not an exception in this sense. Quite the contrary, tourism in Spain has always been a key source of income to the point that it represents more than 10% of the GDP today according to data collected in the last EXCELTUR report.[5] Furthermore, as pointed out by Isabel Cómitre and J. María Valverde (2014), the Spanish administration has been promoting Spain since 1928. The Instituto de Turismo de España (TURESPAÑA), the Spanish Tourist Board, is the administrative unit of the Spanish Central Government in charge of promotingSpain worldwide as a tourist destination through a network of 33 Tourist Offices of Spain aimed at:

 

1. Planning, development and execution of activities aimed at promotingSpainas a tourism destination in the international markets:
2. Support of the marketing of Spanish tourism products abroad in cooperation with the regional and local authorities and the private sector.
3. Establishing the strategy, plan of action and investments for new establishments of Paradores de Turismo de España S.A.[6]

 

It could not be otherwise, TURESPAÑA is well aware of the fact that the stereotypical image ofSpain and the Spaniards in the world is made out of a combination of classic, romantic and regional stereotypes:

 

1. Classic stereotype:Spainis a terrible country, very religious and with little sense of humor.
2. Romantic stereotype:Spainis an exciting country of ancient traditions, with a passion for life.
3. Regional stereotypes: The Basques are workers, the Catalans are the fittest for business, and the Galicians are considered to be slaves in an unfair regime. Meanwhile, Extremadura and Andalusiaare the most negatively stereotyped regions.[7]

 

By nationality, the perception of Spainin the world is revealed by imagenturistica.wordpress.com in the terms following: Spain does not exist for most of the Asiatic citizens. Besides, the perceived quality of the Spanish products in the Asia Pacific region is low. Africans know the Spanish football teams and Americans tend to take Spaniards for Latin Americans even if those American tourists travelling to Spain return with memories of holidays, flamenco, long lunches, late dinners and busy streets and squares all day long. Meanwhile, French citizens are coming to appreciate Spanish cinema and literature and Italians start looking at Spain as a potential competitor. For Germans, Spaniards are proud, cruel, and suspicious of anything foreign. For the British, Spain continues to mean fiesta and disorganization.

In line with a survey carried about by YOUNG&RUBICAM, imagenturistica.wordpress.com proves that Spain is indeed associated with a fun and authentic country in all cases. On the negative side, though, the association of Spain with tradition, little innovation, or lack of style is equally shown in the study. Results derived from a second survey by Papadopoulos/Heslop point to Spaniards as witty, successful, ambitious, hardworking, modern, stylish, and with a sense of humor yet aggressive, arrogant, boring, lazy, and unreliable. For the media,Spain continues to be a country of fiesta and fun.

The aim of the present study is thus to trace the evolution of the Spanish myth through the theory of heuristics, as seen in the seminal works by Tversky and Kahneman (1974), Kahneman et al., (1982), Kahneman (2003).[8] Different tourist campaigns launched by TURESPAÑA during the last years will be taken as a corpus for analysis. Following the theoretical background in the section below, heuristic processing will be applied to the analysis of the evolution of the Spanish myth through the diachronic approach to the different campaigns.

 

 

Theoretical background

 

Amparo Bernabéu and Rafael Rocamora explain that mental images are the basis for processes of evaluation and selection.[9] Depending on personal taste, individuals have a prototypical image of an ideal vacation resulting from a subconscious mental evaluation. Cognitive processes are determined by a personal physical experience of the surrounding world. The perception that an individual has of a tourist destination is conditioned by the information that s/he has been exposed to, in which cognitive models are strongly linked to physical environment. Therefore, the projection of the “official” image of a destination through promotional activities has become crucial in the tourist industry and attracts the interest of both the private and public sectors involved in the tourist phenomenon. The message projected in the campaign, written and/or visual, is key to success.

With this initial reflection in mind, the aim of the present study has been said to be the analysis of the evolution of the Spanish myth by applying the cognitive theory of heuristics to the analysis of a series of campaigns launched by TURESPAÑA. Some conclusions drawn on the use of heuristics are relevant to the aim of the study and include the following:

 

1. Human reasoning leans more on a series of heuristic simplifying reasoning than on an algorithmic and extensive processing of information.
2. Heuristics provide fast and immediate solution processes that are applied automatically and unconsciously.
3. They are intuitive answers to simple questions of probability, frequency and predictability.
4. Although they provide speedy solutions, they are supported by highly sophisticated psychological processes like, for example, association of features, memory, etc.
5. They produce systematic errors in reasoning problems because the heuristic functions tend not to be consistent and coherent with the laws of logics and probability. They rather enable people to make reasonable inferences in the real world according to time, knowledge, and processing skill limitations.

 

If comparing the costs of taking a decision strictly following the rules of logics on the one hand, and following heuristics on the other, it is quite often more efficient to follow the latter. Conducting a probability assessment in real life would imply―following a normative point of view―that the relevant variables and their relative importance would have to be considered, and all the favorable and possible factors determined, etc. Leaving aside the fact that some mistakes would still be possible, the time and cognitive effort involved in taking such a decision would just result in being able to take just a few of them during a lifetime. Meanwhile, the use of heuristics, as an automatic, spontaneous and unconscious process, does significantly help to improve the ability of taking fast and efficient decisions. Several studies have equally shown that decisions based on stereotypes and standardizations, despite their simplicity, are as good as, or even better, than those based on complex and sophisticated techniques with analytical and extensive information.

The present paper provides evidence of the importance of heuristics not only in disciplines such as economics, statistics, management science or philosophy, but also in linguistics.[10] Heuristics allow thinking to be carried out spontaneously, often unconsciously, and with hardly any effort, in search of a balance between relevant information and amount of effort needed. At the same time, previous knowledge, context, co-text and new vs. given information negotiations-in-pursuit of relevance play also a very important role in heuristic processing. Tversky and Kahneman (1974) identified three types of heuristic processes used in most of the reasoning and judgment engaged under uncertainty, which is similar to the ambiguity we find in language use:

 

(i) Representativeness: these heuristic points out that people frequently judge the probability of an event A by its degree of similarity to another event. It is a concept similar to that of “stereotype”. For example, if somebody tells you about a women who divorced three times, lives inLos Angeles and earns a lot of money, we will take her for aHollywood actress since the described attributes are representative of that stereotype.

(ii) Availability: according to this heuristic associative links increase in strength when they repeat themselves. Thus, something more familiar and more accessible is perceived as more real or probable. For this reason, the mere repetition of information through mass media is perceived as more likely just for the fact of being more accessible, independently of its accuracy or precision. As part of a test, subjects were asked if it is more likely to come across words in English that start with r, or words that have r as their third letter. Of course, since it is much easier to recall words that begin with r―such as resistance―than words that have an r as the third letter, most people considered words which begin with r to be more numerous although the opposite is true in English. Results revealed that test-takers approached this problem recalling how many words they had been able to think of.

(iii) Anchoring-adjustment: this heuristic reflects the human tendency to perform judgment based on initial values (anchors), which is later adjusted when new information which may contradict the original flows in. This suggests that in all decision processes, such as understanding an utterance, it is very important the way the information is presented as it becomes the initial reference point (“anchor”) from which newly acquired data will follow. A particular illustrative example of this process is the general resistance to change and acceptance of new ideas expressed by Galbraight, “faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof”.[11]

 

 

Analysis

 

In the analysis following, the application of the three different heuristic processes presented in the preceding theoretical background section ― (i) representativeness, (ii) availability and (iii) anchoring-adjustment ― will be crucial to trace the evolution of the Spanish myth as designed by TURESPAÑA in order to meet the needs of the tourist sector.

 

Representativeness

Under Franco’s Regime, the Spanish Tourist Board opted for campaigns designed to enhance the traditional Spanish values to the maximum, hence contributing to the recurrent representation of the existing stereotypes of sun, fiesta, feria, flamenco and folkloric religion. Well known campaigns such as “Visit Spain” (40s), “Spain is Different” (40s-60s), or “Spain. Walk-ins welcome” (70s) were aimed at putting the emphasis on these recurrent aspects as much as on the Spanish warm hospitality. Figures 1 to 3 below, with examples adapted from tourspain.es, work well to illustrate the representation of the Spanish stereotypes in advertising in those years:

 

Figure 1. 40s. VisitSpain.

 

Figure 2. 40s-60s.Spainis different.

 

Figure 3. 70s.Spain. Walk-ins Welcome.

 

The logo of the Spanish brand was created by world acclaimed painter Miró in 1984. Still in the 80s, this logo came to represent the Spanish black and red colours of the bulls’ skin and blood in bullfighting, the fiesta, the sun, and the warm openness to tourism. The campaign “Spain. Everything under the sun” was launched by TURESPAÑA in 1984 to represent Spain during nine years. The initial aim was to set the focus on the myth of sun and fiesta to evolve in 1991 to “Everything New Under the Sun”, heading towards the future promotion ofSpain as a more diversified and higher quality destination.

 

Figure 4. 80s.Spain. Everything under the sun.

 

Availability (intermediate phase)

 

 

It was not until the beginning of the 90s, following nine long years of contribution to the representation of the Spanish myth of the sun and the fiesta that some slight changes started to be introduced. Hence the campaign “Spain. Everything (New) under the Sun” was launched in 1991 to promote not only the traditional sun of Spain but also the Spanish vast artistic and monumental heritage. This goes quite in line with the immediately following 1992 Seville World Exhibition, which was meant to be the new image of a democratic, modern and plural Spain to the eyes of the world.[12] As shown in Figure 5, the idea was to reproduce both the familiar logo representing the Spanish myth of sun and fiesta and the old slogan “Everything under the sun” to covertly insert the adjective “new”, in red, as if spontaneously overhandwritten on the original advertising. Pictures of well known Spanish landmarks or paintings complemented the new slogan: “Everything new under the sun”. This leads us back to the second type of heuristics―“something more familiar and more accessible is perceived as more real or probable. For this reason, the mere repetition of information through mass media is perceived as more likely just for the fact of being more accessible, independently of its accuracy or precision”. Logo and slogan were repeated while changes seem to have been introduced as if they were little additions to the existing stereotypes which were already familiar to the target visitors. The very sameSpain that they knew and/or remembered was then worth visiting beyond its sun. The adjective “new” was only to be taken as an extension of the original myth ofSpain.

 

Figure 5.Spain. Everything “new” under the sun.

 

This second heuristic process is relevant to the point that a later campaign launched by TURESPAÑA in 1998 to 2001, “Bravo Spain”, failed to reach the target visitors because, this paper proves, it failed to comply with these key heuristic principles when trying to avoid the stereotypical ideas of sun and fiesta to favour aspects other like architecture. The aim was to convey an image of modern, high quality country by means of promoting a diverse tourist offer, with a variety of travel alternative to sun and fiesta. Nevertheless, a recent study on the campaign “Bravo Spain” carried about by Tourism & Leisure[13] proved this to be a cold and static campaign showing a different Spain that ended up being hard to identify with the warmth and the vitality traditionally associated with the country. Advertising Spanish as isolated from the sun and the fiesta was equally proved by the study in question to have confused the European tourists (See Figure 6 below).

 

Figure 6. BravoSpain.

 

 

Following the light of “Bravo Spain”, “Spain Marks” was launched in 2002-2003 to equally try to change the image of Spainas a traditional destination of sun and fiesta in order to show a passionate lifestyle that “marks” the visitor. Potential visitors―seventeen markets in ten languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Finnish, Swedish and Danish―were not to remain indifferent. For Cómitre and Valverde (2014), this is TURESPAÑA’s most innovative promotion campaign ever. As the authors explain, each advertisement of the campaign showed a different aspect of Spain, using impact-based images. They claim the key to this successful campaign to lie on the fact that TURESPAÑA proposed a clear series of communication objectives to be achieved by means of:

1. PromotingSpain’s diversity
2. Involving the target audience
3. Offering quality as a singular element ofSpain
4. Mirroring ‘the Spanish attitude’[14]

The authors also explain how TURESPAÑA first pre-selected five prospective campaigns and submitted them to evaluation tests in the main receiving markets (United Kingdom,France,Germany and theUSA). Second, the board chose the campaign that had been proved to be most effective in the tests and to best meet the stated requirements:

1. Provide an overall image ofSpain(not only sun and beach but also monuments, museums, sport, wellness, conferences, etc.)

2.   Distinguish quality as a singular element ofSpain(cultural events, innovative infrastructures, etc.)

3.    Leave an unforgettable impression

4.    Promote the “Spanish attitude” that means hospitality, friendliness, the Spanish way of life[15]

It is needless to say that “Spain Marks” was also aimed at advertising sun and fiesta plus museums and a friendly hospitality along with an unforgettable impression, what makes this an impact-based campaign with no actual new elements added. After a failed “Bravo Spain”, TURESPAÑA insisted on the reiteration of “new” elements by strategically introducing them together with the traditional stereotypes. The campaign slogan reflected the idea transmitted by the visuals which showed a person, a potential tourist, physically and emotionally touched after visiting Spain. In Figure 7 below, we can appreciate the marks of the sun and the beach on the tourists’ skin as much as their signs of feria, fiesta and flamenco. At the same time, though, the “new” cultural heritage of Spain represented by the well-known museums Museo del Prado and Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is similarly expressed both in the written and the visual texts that present a lady with a haircut that reminds the Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas or a gentleman who looks after Dalí. All in all, old and “new” stereotypes are refreshed once placed at the same level in this extremely catchy campaign. That is to say, “Spain Marks” works because it does successfully activate the second heuristic process by which old and new stereotypes collide towards the actual creation of the target myth.

Figure 7.SpainMarks.

 

Anchoring-adjustment:

“Smile! You are inSpain” (2004-2009) results conservative when compared with “Spain Marks” since impact was no longer the focus in this latter campaign. Images were then simple and classic. The tourists in the pictures were seen while enjoyingSpain: a sunny and friendly atmosphere suitable for business, culture, leisure or sports (See Figure 8 below).

Figure 8. Smile! You are inSpain.

From 2004 to 2009, this conservative campaign succeeded to anchor the stereotypes that would be challenged by the following campaign ― “Spain. 25 years going beyond the sun” (See Figure 9 below) ― that would be launched in 2008 to commemorate twenty-five years of Dalí’s logo. The third heuristic process establishes anchoring as a must mid-stage part of the process prior to final adjustment.

Figure 9.Spain. 25 years going beyond the sun.

 

Twenty-five years after David’s logo originated, TURESPAÑA was finally ready to openly leave the old myths of sun and fiesta behind in order to strengthen the new image ofSpain as a modern tourist destination. Old pictures of tourists in previous visits toSpain were then photo-pasted into contemporary pictures of the country. The aim was to show the evolution thatSpain had undergone during the previous twenty-five years and to make tourists realize that they could be positively surprised by a new Spain, with a different, high quality alternative to the old myth.

Conclusions

 

The combination of heuristic processing and media representation of the Spanish myth through advertising have been proved to be crucial to trace the evolution of this myth ideated by TURESPAÑA to meet the different needs of the national tourist sector. Three heuristic processes ― (i) representativeness, (ii) availability and (iii) anchoring-adjustment ― have served to revisit the myth of Spain through the analysis of different campaigns launched by TURESPAÑA since its creation back in 1928. Each of the three processes in question has been applied to the analysis of each of the so-identified stages that help to trace the evolution of the myth ofSpain to date.

 

Unless otherwise specified, all the images in the different Figures have been adapted from tourspain.es.

 

Bibliography

 

Amparo Bernabéu and Rafael Rocamora, “‘Spain is different’. La función apelativa en campañas turísticas españolas”, in Gran Tour: Revista de Investigaciones Turísticas, no.2, 2010, p. 83-100.

Isabel Cómitre and José María Valverde, “How to translate culture-specific items: a case study of tourist promotion campaign by Turespaña”, in The Journal of Specialised Translation, no. 21, (2014). http://www.jostrans.org/issue21/art_comitre.php

Elena Domínguez Romero and Mª Victoria Martín de la Rosa, “The Role of Heuristic Processing in Author/Audience Interaction: The Case of Shakespeare’s The Tempest”, in Vladimir Polyakov and Valery Solovyev (eds.) Cognitive Modelling in Linguistics, New Castle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, p. 45-63.

Elena Domínguez Romero, “MALE VS. FEMALE / MIND VS. BODY: A Cognitive Discourse Approach To Two Plays by Shakespeare”, Gender Studies, 2013, DOI: 10.2478/genst-20130001.

E. Heath, “Key Trends and challenges in destination marketing: the need for a new paradigm”, in J. Ruddy and S. Flanagan (eds.), Tourism Destination Marketing; Gaining the Competitive Edge, Dublin, Tourism Research Centre, Dublin Institute of Technology, 2000, p. 130.

Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky, Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristic and biases,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Daniel Kahneman, “Mapas de racionalidad limitada: Psicología para una economía conductual”, in Revista Asturiana de Economía, no. 28, 2003, p. 181-204.

F. Javier Noya, “La Imagen Exterior de España: nuevos escenarios y viejos problemas” in Documentos de Trabajo (Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales y Estratégicos), no. 60, 2009.

Claire Pot, An evaluation of Spain’s marketing campaign ‘Smile you are in Spain’, through an image analysis in the Dutch market, MA European Tourism Management,BournemouthUniversity, 2005.

José Miguel Sánchez Guitián, Marca País. España, una marca líquida, Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid), ESIC Editorial, 2012.

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases”, in Science, no. 185, 1974, p. 1124-1130.

 

Websites:

Estereotipos y retos

http://www.exceltur.org

http://tourspain.es

Estereotipos y retos

http://www.sevilla.org/ciudad/historia/expo-92

http://tourism.blogs.ie.edu/

 

 

Notes