Place Branding

Connecting Tourist Experiences to Places

Pantea Foroudi, Chiara Mauri, Charles Dennis, T C Melewar, Pantea Foroudi, Chiara Mauri, Charles Dennis, T C Melewar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032083230
• eBook ISBN: 9781317080640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Place branding as a field of research is still in a state of infancy. This book seeks to address this, offering a theory of place branding based on the tourist experience, keeping in mind the roles of stakeholders, both public and private organisations and DMOs in managing the place brand.

Place Branding: Connecting Tourist Experiences to Places seeks to build a customer-based view of place branding through focusing on the individual as a tourist who travels to undertake a memorable experience. The place is the key creator of this experience, which begins well before the travel-to and ends well after the travel-back. Individuals choose the places where to go, collect information on them, ask for advice and suggestions from fellow travellers, give feedback when they come back and talk a lot about their experience, spreading word-of-mouth. The book enables readers to understand how the tourist experience can be managed as a brand. Readers are exposed to a variety of problems, methodological approaches, and geographical areas, which allows them to adapt frames to different contexts and situations.

This book is recommended reading for students and scholars of business, marketing, tourism, urban studies and public diplomacy, as well as practitioners, business consultants and people working in public administration and politics.

Part I
Introduction

1 Place branding

Connecting tourist experiences to places

Pantea Foroudi, Chiara Mauri, Charles Dennis, and T C Melewar

Introduction

Two texts can be considered as seminal contributions to the place branding literature, both published in 2002: the book Destination Branding, edited by Morgan, Pritchard and Pride, and the special issue “Nation Branding” of the Journal of Brand Management (vol. 9, issue 4). The authors of the first book are two academicians and one practitioner (Pride); the editor of the special issue (Anholt), who is neither properly a practitioner (being qualified as “one of the UK’s best-known international marketing thinkers,” p. 1) nor an academician, writes in his Foreword, “To be plunged back in the world of academia after nearly 18 years in the world of ‘practice’ has reminded me sharply of both its attractions and its limitations.” Of the 19 contributors to the special issue, roughly half are academicians, many are practitioners, a few are politicians (one is a ministry); of the academicians, approximately half are professors of marketing, while the others work in history, in arts, and in tourism.

This beginning qualifies immediately place branding as a multi-faceted field, a cross-road between academicians of many disciplines, practitioners working in private companies and public institutions, and politicians.

Actually, the topic was anticipated almost 10 years before 2002, when in 1993 two books were published: Marketing Places: Attracting Investment, Industry, And Tourism To Cities, States and Nations, written by Kotler et al., and Product-Country Images: Impact and Role in International Marketing, edited by Papadopoulos and Heslop. The fact that Kotler appears as an author on the topic is in itself a clear signal that place marketing and branding are significant fields, and had already developed a body of knowledge that could be packaged in a book for larger dissemination.

Another significant landmark is the article Nation-brands of the twenty-first century (Anholt 1998), which, assigning the status of brands to some countries and not to others, opened a new stream of inquiry with clear political implications. Simon Anholt has indeed developed a toolkit that public policy-makers can use to measure the strength of their place’s brand and to understand its components. In his continuous effort to build and spread the knowledge on place branding, in 2004 he created the journal Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, which, together with the Journal of Place Management and Development (founded in 2008) and the latest Journal of Destination Marketing and Management (founded in 2012), nurture and broaden the debate involving a growing number of contributors (Table 1.1). The SCImago Rankings shown in Table 1.1 can be segmented not only by journal but also by country, a clear sign of the relevance of the geographic dimension also in scientific literature.

In the same years in which the debate grows, we see the appearance of the first destination brands indexes and rankings. While they do not seem to be much used in academic publications, nonetheless they have the merit to raise the attention of the stakeholders involved in managing places, and to put in the spotlight that the brand dimension of a country can be a key factor for its competitiveness. The publication of these rankings has an interesting positive effect: the particular position of a country in a rank can be the starting point of a demanding, long and complex process of rethinking the place as a brand to improve its score, and even to develop new indexes.

Following the low ranking of South Korea, 33 out of 50 in 2008 Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, the government of South Korea decided to take action in order to climb up the rankings. In January 2009, President Lee Myung-bak, who made upgrading South Korean nation brand one of the priorities of its mandate, created the Presidential Council on Nation Branding, which consisted of 47 members: 34 civilian members and 13 government officials (including 8 ministers).

We are one of the most technological advanced nations, and the first images evoked by foreigners are strikes and street protests. If our country wants to be considered an advanced country, we must work hard to improve its image and its reputation.

(Dinnie 2010; Schwak 2016)

Table 1.1 Ratings of journals involved in the debate on place branding (in parenthesis the year of foundation)

Journals	SJR^a (2017)
Journal of Destination Marketing & Management (2012)	1.148
Journal of Brand Management (1993)	0.640
Journal of Place Management and Development (2008)	0.35
Place Branding and Public Diplomacy (2004)	0.30

a SJR = Scimago Journal Rank.

The Chairman of the Council announced in March 2009 that the goal of the Presidential Council on Nation Branding was to raise South Korea’s ranking in the index of 18 spots in 4 years, reaching rank 15 by 2013. The goal was not reached, and in 2014 South Korea ranked 27 out of 50.

This process of branding places, which involves a very large number of public and private stakeholders, has been the topic of many case studies, published in academic journals. The increasing availability of newer and newer experiences to tell is probably one of the reasons why the literature has been focused on descriptive cases (Muñiz Martinez 2012) and has been scarcely involved in developing a theoretical framework (Gertner 2011; Hanna & Rowley 2011). The consequence is that “Place branding still lacks a clear and commonly accepted theoretical framework that would structure and guide its practical application and fill the evident gap between existing theory and practice” (Ashworth et al. 2015, p. 2). The field is very much practitioner-led, and sees an absolute predominance of articles of qualitative nature based on the authors’ personal opinions, and paradoxically the scarcity of empirical research (Gertner 2011). Practice has been abundant, while theory has lagged behind.

Besides country brand indexes, rankings, and case studies, another stream that has been developing through the years is the distinction between branding different geographical units: nations (Dinnie 2008; Marino & Mainolfi 2013), regions and cities (Anttiroiko 2014; Dinnie 2011; Kavaratzis & Ashworth 2010; Kavaratzis et al. 2015), small cities (Baker 2012), glocal and virtual identities (Govers & Go 2009), and other hybrid units (Zenker 2015). If on one side it is true that identities of different classes require dedicated attention, we believe that the critical issue is not to see these concepts as separate units, but rather to integrate the branding of a nation with that of its regions, cities or even parts of the city. As well as companies have to organize hierarchically their product portfolio to develop an effective brand architecture strategy, the stakeholders involved in branding different geographical and physical identities must investigate their hierarchy, which is not only a matter of physical size, neither of administrative boundaries.

The difference between applying the brand relationship spectrum (Aaker & Joachimsthaler 2000; Keller 2014) to brand a portfolio of products and a portfolio of geographical units is that place branding appears to be an organic concept springing from the routine behavior of a large variety of stakeholders (residents, tourists, firms, public institutions, investors, etc.), but most of them are not aware of their effective contribution to the equity of the place (Medway et al. 2015). What’s more, while images of places evolve over time, the place’s past can continue to exert a strong effect on its current image (Govers & Go 2009) so that this image appears as a stereotype emerging from the many activities, behavior, political and economic issues in which a place has been involved in its past history (Boland 2008). In this perspective, place images may be hard to change in a short time: “Paris is about style, Japan about technology, Switzerland about wealth and precision, Rio de Janeiro about carnival and football, Tuscany about the good life, and most African nations about poverty, corruption, war, famine and disease,” noted Anholt in 2007 (p. 1). We do not know if these stereotypes still hold today, but it is certainly true that it is very tough for a country to convince people living in other countries to stop thinking in frames and start seeing the place the way it really is (Kotler & Gertner 2002). What is even more is that these clichés affect how people treat other close places, as it may be true for South Korea and North Korea, or for South Africa compared to the African continent.

In its relatively short life, place branding has evolved in different stages, where each stage was not substituting the old one, but rather coexisted (Kavaratzis & Ashworth 2010), so that the topic becomes more and more multidimensional and multi-faceted, and the delimitation of the field is still rather blurred (Gertner 2011).

“Rethinking place branding” was the call for action of Kavaratzis et al. in 2015, and each chapter of their book was dedicated to the rethinking of something related to the place: the concept, the image, the physical communication, and the sense of place. Even if someone was questioning whether talking and theorizing about place branding could be a waste of time (Medway et al. 2015), we have made the call ours, and this book is the result of the contributions of all the scholars who have answered the call.

The innovative perspective of this book is told in the second part of the title: Connecting tourism experiences to places. The reinterpretation of the relationship between people and brands as brand experiences brought about by the experience economy (Pine & Gilmore 1998, 1999) and by the experiential marketing orientation (Schmitt 1997, 1999) has had a strong impact on tourist behavior, which is more and more interpreted as a travel and visitation experience (Morgan et al. 2010; Richtie et al. 2011). Understanding the nature of tourism experiences can add significant value to academicians and practitioners, since offering tourisms memorable experiences is the essence of tourism management: what matters to visitors is places that provide attractive experiences for them. From each place, they may visit for any reason, tourists expect something special, real and authentic, something that engages their senses and touches their heart. They want to live an experience that is worth to be lived, remembered and told.

This book is organized in five parts: an introductory part, a second part dedicated to the tourist experience, a third section focused on customer-based place branding, a fourth part centered on destination brand management, and a concluding section on actual trends and future challenges for place branding.

After this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 is an overview of tourism trends and challenges. From 25 million international arrivals in 1950 to 1,326 billion in 2017, tourism has been one of the world’s fastest growing economic sectors, and it is projected to increase to 1.8 billion by 2030. The greater availability of international tourism locations segmented by different motivations and behavior makes very hot the place branding issue: where are people going, and what are the motivations behind the choice of destinations to visit?

Visitors’ length of stay at a place varies between tourism segments, hence also by the same experience of the place. In Chapter 3, a survival analysis of a sample of tourists in a summer mountainous region allows to identify the profile of tourists who stay for longer periods at a place, which greatly helps public bodies in choosing the best targets for their place branding strategy. One of the key conclusions of the chapter is that to stimulate tourism segments to spend more time at a place, the offer should be more diversified to satisfy their different motivations and preferences.

In the same vein, Chapter 4 suggests that the place branding of a winter mountain destinations should go beyond mountain, snow and ski. An extensive research conducted in three locations reveals the existence of different segments, differentiated in terms of activities they practice and the time dedicated to each activity. Branding geographies such as mountain areas cannot be based only on physical assets and on sport activities but requires going beyond the landscape to understand its meaning for different tourist segments.

The formation of the image of a place is heavily influenced by the social media, in particular by the content provided by the same visitors who are experiencing the place. Chapter 5 explores the content generated by tourists through their pictures posted on Flickr and compares this content to the one communicated by the local destination management organization through photos posted on Facebook. The analysis of the differences between the perceived and the projected image of the place reveals new opportunities to reinforce the strategy of place branding, satisfying the propensity of return tourists to experience all the areas of a place, and not only the hotspots.

Place image is a component of customer-based brand equity, and in Chapter 6, Bose et al. develop a new scale to measure place image.

Tourists’ interpretation of a place is influenced by traveler orientation, that is, by tourism operators’ knowledge of travelers’ needs and by their promptness in satisfying them. Chapter 7 analyzes this relationship and investigates how digital marketing can shape it. Chapter 8 moves a step forward on place image, exploring the nation brand perception of Ghana and suggesting new avenues to redefine Ghana as an attractive country for tourists and investors.

The tourism experience is an experience of loyalty, reputation, satisfaction, and passion towards the place, which is shaped not only by tourism operators b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• PART I Introduction
• PART II The tourist experience
• PART III Place branding: a customer-based view
• PART IV Destination brand management
• PART V Conclusions
• Index