Welcome to Bomanjo
Francisco Tigre Moura has achieved the equivalent of a Kiwi student producing an exceptional PhD thesis written in Portuguese at a Brazilian university.
The Otago marketing student's doctoral thesis has been deemed by his three examiners to meet the University's “exceptional quality” threshold of being “of an exceptional standard in every respect – research content, originality, quality of expression and accuracy of presentation…” The accolade is all the more remarkable because English is the Brazilian student's second language.
Tigre Moura completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in Brazil, but chose Otago for his doctoral studies. “I felt the need to explore and meet others and be in a different environment. And I was looking for a university that had a research group in tourism marketing.”
For his thesis, on tourism destination websites, he explored 130 sites from New Zealand, China and India and then set up four versions of an experimental website of a fictitious tourism destination (a place called Bomanjo) and tested them on 400 New Zealand undergraduate students.
The results challenge the traditional wisdom that the most effective websites are those that tailor content and design to the different cultures of their users. Tourism destination websites that presented potential travellers with a cultural clash led to a more positive image of the destination, higher willingness to travel and more positive perceptions of the website's design.
After three years at Otago, Tigre Moura is off to England to take up a lectureship at the University of Derby.