Online Marketing of European Geoparks as a Landscape Promotion Tool
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
Thank you for interesting submission. The problem addressed is undoubtedly very relevant to the development of geoparks. The following are comments on the text that I think can improve the quality of the manuscript.
General comment - I understand that the manuscript is a synthesis. But I don't know if it's appropriate to generalize the results of the study so explicitly. Not a single name of a geopark appears in the text. Detailed comments in this regard below.
1. Title - In my opinion, the title does not fully correspond to the content of the manuscript. The purpose of the research was primarily to assess the extent of information available online regarding European geoparks. Analyses did not focus solely on Place (landscape) but a much wider range (Table 1).
2. Abstract - In my opinion, the abstract should be rewritten. As it stands, it is too broad and not specific enough. It does not contain Results at all. The structure of the abstract in my opinion should be as follows - Relevance of the research problem, subject of the study, research methods, results, main conclusions.
3. Introduction - There is a lack of information on the status of research on the evaluation of online promotion of geodiscovery, geotourism and, finally, geoparks. I do not know on what basis the authors stated that the marketing of geoparks is at a very low level, basically non-existent (verses 95-96). Do they have research results in this area?
4. Background - I do not understand the need for this chapter in the manuscript. In my opinion, the issues concerning the definition and function of geoparks should be placed in the introduction. On the other hand, the section of the text from line 156 to 249 is too general and irrelevant to the research conducted and its results. The results of the analyses in no way relate to the profile of tourists, their motivations, etc. What was the purpose of including this information in the manuscript?
What is missing from the manuscript, however, is basic information about the network of European geoparks. What countries they are located in, when the network began to be created, etc.
5. Methods - What is missing, in my opinion, is an explanation of how the transition was made from the evaluation of each criterion (rating from 1 to 5) to the results presented in the charts (%). The rules for evaluating individual criteria should be more clearly described. In the manuscript, we find what is meant by a score of 1 and 5. But under what rules were scores of 2, 3 and 4 awarded? These should be clearly described rules. The criteria vary greatly. What does a rating of 1 and a rating of 5 mean for museum tickets? The price? Price information? Similarly for product package? Is "5" the lack of a product or its poor description. Without clear rules of assessment, it is difficult to assess the reliability of the results obtained.
6. Results - As I mentioned earlier, it is not clear to me what the individual values on the charts mean, what does 80% and what does 100% mean? In my opinion, when describing individual groups of criteria, examples of good practices from specific geoparks should be given. Without specific examples, the text is very monotonous.
7. Discussion - In my opinion, the authors should confront the results of their analyzes with the results of research on online marketing of geotourism and geoparks (for example: Rozenkiewicz, A.; Widawski, K.; Jary, Z. Geotourism and the 21st Century–NTOs’ Website Information Availability on Geotourism Resources in Selected Central European Countries: International Perspective. Resources 2020, 9, 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/resources9010004; Tiago, F.; Correia, P.; Briciu, V.-A.; Borges-Tiago, T. Geotourism Destinations Online Branding Co-Creation. Sustainability 2021, 13, 8874. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13168874
In my opinion, the authors should clearly and emphatically highlight the strengths and weaknesses of online marketing of European geoparks. Perhaps in the form of a SWOT analysis. With an indication of good practices.
8. Conclusions - Conclusions should be specific and focus on the most important achievements of research on online marketing of geoparks. Lines 534 to 544 are for Introduction, not Conclusions. It is not allowed to cite publications of other authors in the conclusions. They are based on own research.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your time and for any comments whitch help improve our contribution. We hope that the adjustments we have made are in line with your suggestions and comments.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
The content of the article deals with an interesting and relevant research thread. However, I have the impression that the text needs refinement. In particular, the description of the research procedure used - as indicated below - needs serious revision. It is likely that a second look at the research methodology used will prompt the authors themselves to revise some of the content of the manuscript. Scientific integrity is also important as far as the history of the 4P marketing concept is concerned.
The concept of the 4 P's (product, price, place, promotion) within the marketing mix was developed in 1960 by E. Jerome McCarthy - co-author (with W. Perrault Jr. and J.P. McCann) of the book Basic Marketing: a managerial approach (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000041584743&view=1up&seq=7 - in B.1. section). And this author should necessarily be cited first in the paper when discussing the 4P concept instead of, for example, the paper by Karim et al. (2021), who unfortunately have unreliably prepared a literature review as far as 4P marketing is concerned.
Notes on the research methodology:
To lines 251-314: At the beginning it would be good to synthetically characterise the research area. With the reader in mind, please also prepare a Graphical Abstract (outline of the method procedure), because the description of the research procedure is unclear. "Along the way" in its description, side threads are touched upon, which make it very difficult to follow the description of the research steps used, including the techniques and tools and the methods employed. In this case, the method used was mainly a web search of the European Geoparks Network and this should also be written in the abstract. The perception of the substantive content of the whole article depends on a clear description of the research procedure, so this needs to be done transparently.
To lines 274-280: 'Another important step in the analysis was...'. : what specific research procedure was used for this?
To Table 1: please clarify whether the data matrix in this table was prepared by the authors of this article or taken from some other study?
To lines 281-294: I feel that a simple point scoring method was used to assess the variety of information on the pages of the various geoparks. It is just not clear why an inverted scale of point values was used compared to the one used by other authors? It would have been better to adopt the generally functioning principles of scoring/scoring the completeness of site information, as used, for example, in the work of; B. Spasojević, D. Berić, I. Stamenković, or for example; HTT Hoang et al. (2018). Furthermore, there is no explanation as to why this was done. Was the number of analysed geoparks verified on this basis and, e.g., only those that corresponded to an assumption accepted for further analysis?
To lines 297-310, 311-314: what specific research procedure was used for this purpose?
What method was used to present the results in Figures 4-7?
How about identifying from the results the weaknesses and strengths of the online marketing of the analysed geoparks in the context of the 4Ps?
In the "Discussion" section, please concretely discuss the results obtained with those previously published by other authors in this area and referred to in the first part of the paper. Please also indicate what new findings the authors have obtained as a result of their research.
In the "Conclusion" section, please specifically relate the results obtained to the matrix in Table 1 and to the 4P marketing model.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your time and for any comments whitch help improve our contribution. We hope that the adjustments we have made are in line with your suggestions and comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for the revisions.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your time and for any comments whitch helped improve our contribution.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
Most of the comments and remarks have been taken into account by the authors of the manuscript. Although there is still an unanswered comment to lines 362-373: I feel that a simple point scoring method was used to assess the variety of information on the pages of the various geoparks. It is just not clear why an inverted scale of point values was used compared to the one used by other authors? According to which paper did the authors of the manuscript adopt the scoring rule? It would have been better to adopt the generally functioning principles of scoring/scoring the completeness of site information, as used, for example, in the work of; B. Spasojević, D. Berić, I. Stamenković, or for example; HTT Hoang et al. (2018).
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your time and for any comments whitch help improve our contribution. We hope that the adjustments we have made are in line with your suggestions and comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
