Changing Actor’s Cognitive Schema of the Destination: Implications of a Flow-Based View

Research on strategic cognition suggests that the ability of managers to cope with the complexities of managing and marketing destinations depends on the cognitive schema they deploy to make sense of information, decide on strategic action, and enact their environment. We take Beritelli, Bieger, and, Laesser’s (2014) flow-based conceptualization of the destination as an exemplar of recent more multifaceted destination concepts. In our study, we investigate how supply-side actors’ mental representations of the destination and cognition on key strategic variables change as they get to know and start to work with the tools of a flow-based model. This represents a first step toward understanding the outcome of a shift toward a more differentiated destination concept.