This Bachelor’s thesis focuses on studying what kind of marketing channels Finnish music festivals use for reaching foreign tourists. The main purpose of the thesis was to examine the marketing methods of festivals from all around Finland representing different music genres. In addition, the thesis aimed at researching the festival organisers’ visions about the strengths and weaknesses of Finland as a cultural tourism destination and to study the benefits of the work of Visit Finland from the festival organisers’ point of view.

The theoretical framework consists of an analysis of the researches conducted in the field of tourism. This Bachelor’s thesis discusses the basis of tourism marketing and cultural tourism in addition to the results of the study conducted for the Bachelor’s thesis. Tourism marketing differs from marketing of tangible products in many ways due to the fact that most of the tourism products are actually services. The characteristics of tourism products make it impossible for the customer to be certain of the quality of the service he is purchasing.

The research conducted for the thesis was executed by using qualitative research methods. The author performed a series of theme interviews after making a prequestionnaire via email. The prequestionnaire was sent to nine Finnish music festivals from different music genres. However, only five out of the nine festivals responded, and four of them were suitable for the research. In addition to the four festival representatives, the author interviewed the executive director of Fin-land Festivals. The data for the research was collected during early spring 2015.

The results show that electronic marketing, especially social media, plays a significant role in the marketing of festivals nowadays among traditional marketing channels. The results also indicate that Finland has various strengths in cultural tourism but some matters can still be developed. One of those aspects that was seen in the results was that the cooperation between different service providers should be improved because it might have a positive impact on the profits of all parties.

The data collected for the thesis was of good quality although the sample size of the research was smaller than the author intended due to the large amount of negative or unusable responds. However, due to the small sample size the results cannot be broadly generalized but the commissioner can use the parts they find useful.