Marketing National Parks for Sustainable Tourism

Stephen L. Wearing, Stephen Schweinsberg, John Tower

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781845415600
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie de l'hôtellerie, du voyage et du tourisme

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the key principles and challenges involved in tourism marketing in a national park context. It provides a framework to apply marketing principles to inform practices and guide the sustainable management of national parks and protected areas. The main themes address the foundation principles of marketing and contextualise these principles around a series of key insights and challenges related to the delivery of sustainable tourism services in national parks. The book centres on the issues faced by park managers as they address the need to manage national parks sustainably for future generations. It will be of interest to natural resource and tourism students, tourism scholars and natural resource managers as well as researchers in the areas of geography and forestry.

1An Environmental Context for Sustainable National Park Marketing

Handle the challenge of change well, and you can prosper greatly. Handle it poorly, and can put yourselves and others at risk

(Kotter & Rathgeber, 2006: 3)

Introduction

Since the World Commission on Environment and Development first proposed their iconic definition of sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the future without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1990: 8); academia, the tourism industry, tourists and various other stakeholders have shown an innate fascination with exploring the processes and outcomes that are possible from the development of a sustainable global tourism industry. While the parameters of exactly what sustainable tourism does and does not encompass continue to be debated, a recurring theme in much of the published academic scholarship relates to the merging of a range of environmental, economic and social forces in particular destination settings.

Marketing represents the process through which economy is integrated into society to serve human needs (Drucker, 1958: 252 in Kotler, 2011: 135). Within mainstream marketing literature, Kotler (2011) recently advocated for a departure from a philosophy that sees marketing as having infinite resources to draw on and zero environmental impact. The marketing of tourism in sensitive environments of the world is not a zero sum game. Neoliberalist based strategic marketing decisions do inevitably have a range of social, cultural, experiential and ecological consequences for the environment in which they seek to operate. To this end Kotler (2011) suggests that companies need to give more consideration to the manner in which they balance and integrate their organisational growth targets with a range of other environmental targets.

In the present work we wish to explore the process of integration in an environment that for many is a quintessential part of tourism systems throughout the world, national parks. Since their initial inception, national parks have had a volatile relationship to the tourism industry. Because of their dual conservation/utilitarian management agendas, park managers, environmentalists and others are often quick to dismiss nature-based tourism as being yet another example of unrestrained travel based capitalism. In the present work we will aim to test this proposition, and ask two controversial questions of our readers in relation to national park based tourism marketing. Should marketing continue to be seen, as it so often is, as the quintessential exhibit of a neoliberalist based industry standing in direct opposition to environmental preservation? Or is it perhaps not better seen as a tool that can be used by park managers to advance their dominant environmental preservation agenda?

A Critical Reflection of Sustainable National Park Based Tourism Marketing

The development of a sustainable marketing orientation requires that one merge ‘the conceptual principles of sustainable development with market orientation’ (Mitchell et al., 2010: 695). In doing so, one is forced to find a balance between supporting the continued growth of neoliberalist, profit oriented industries on the one hand; whilst simultaneously affording equal consideration to the more nuanced social forces in an organisation’s operating environment. There are numerous mechanisms whereby this can be achieved. In Chapter 2 of the present work the authors will examine in detail a range of alternative marketing forms including: relationship marketing, ecological marketing etc. These and other forms of marketing are predicated on an idea from Belz and Peattie (2009 in Mitchell et al., 2013: 698) ‘that sustainable marketing responds to consumer needs and marketplace opportunities, [while] reflecting company values, [and being] … well suited to company resources and capabilities’.

The companies to which we refer are the various protected area agencies that are responsible for the management of national parks and other protected areas throughout the world (see for example Griffin et al., 2010b). These park managers, who form one of the main intended readerships of this book, are almost without exception committed to the preservation of the natural and social world. They are the custodians of a common resource that is important to people the world over, and are part of a noble lineage that can be traced back to the early environmental pioneers including John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. John Muir once famously characterised himself as a man of many hats; ‘I am a poetico –trampo – geologist – bot. and ornith – natural, etc. !!!’ (MacFarlane – Introduction in Muir, 2007: vii). Far from diminishing Muir’s legacy, the multiple faces of John Muir has allowed him to simultaneously unlock the geological secrets of the Yosemite Valley, whilst founding the modern conservation movement, and through his own prose, to draw an ever increasing number of readers into the innate beauty of the natural world. Change was a reality for Muir, just as it is for park managers today. In his lifetime he was forced to respond to competing stakeholder viewpoints over the sustainable management of a number of locations in the Californian wilderness including the Hetch Hetchy Valley and the Grand Canyon.

Some of Muir’s advocacy endeavours were a success; others at the time were failures. The legacy that is inherited by park managers today is more than the preservation of particular plots of land. It is instead the ‘widespread conviction that our national parks should be held inviolate’ (Sierra Club, 2015). Exactly what it means to be held inviolate in the context of national park tourism management is just as vexed a question for park managers today as it was for Muir in the mid-19th century. In the course of describing his first avalanche, Muir makes an oblique reference to tourism’s future potential noting that whilst others may say that ‘steam has spiritualised travel; through unspiritual smells, smoke etc. … This flight in what could be called a milky way of snow-stars was the most spiritual and exhilarating of all modes of motion I have ever experienced’ (Muir, 2007: xv–xvi). The notion that there is somehow something lacking in certain types of travel experiences, and simultaneously mysticism about others, draws the reader’s attention to the case specificity of tourism development. Throughout this book we will draw attention to the long and evolving history of tourism in different national parks throughout the world. Drawing on the words which opened this chapter, from the influential organisational change and leadership theorist Professor John Kotter and his colleague Holger Rathgeber, we will argue that far from being at odds with the dominant national park conservation ethic; tourism, if planned correctly, can play an important part in ensuring a sustainable future for park ecosystems.

In order for tourism and conservation to achieve a symbiotic relationship of mutual dependence there is a necessity that both sides of the land-use fence realise their own unique, but also mutually reinforcing, histories. As Professor Tina Seelig from Stanford University has noted, it is through the reframing of problems that one can unlock innovation (see Seelig, 2012). When viewed from an organisational management perspective, innovation has been defined as the ‘creation of either a new process (process innovation) or a new product or service (product/ service innovation) that has an impact on the way the organisation operates’ (Clegg et al., 2011b: 663). Over the last 100 to 150 years, innovation has become synonymous with modern business practice. Pioneers of business innovation including Henry Ford, along with waves of technology innovators including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, have provided a fertile ground for academic inquiry, exemplified in iconic works including Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (Christensen, 2013).

Porter (1996 in Clegg et al., 2011a: 183) defines the process of innovation as being connected to a firm’s strategic priorities in the sense that ‘strategy means being different, or doing different things’. The process whereby one sets one’s self apart from ones rivals necessitates business seeing its position in a dynamic business environment made up of a diverse set of market and non-market forces. Sustainable tourism, which will be one of the major themes running through the present book, is not just about the preservation of an industry’s position in an economically competitive travel market place; it is about the role that tourism has to protect the sociocultural and physical environment in which it is situated from unsustainable development. In this way we would argue, the strategy of nature-based tourism businesses must be situated in the context of practice (see Carter, 2013; Carter et al., 2008a, 2008b; Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009; Whittington, 1996 for a discussion of strategy as practice, 2007). Strategy as practice has been described by Clegg et al. (2011a: 27) as a ‘network of scholars concerned with the everyday processes, practices and activities involved in the making of strategy’. Formed as a counterpoint to traditional strategy theorists, including Ansoff and Porter who had proposed a rationalist conceptualisation of strategy; strategy as practice theorists have proposed an ad hoc phenomena ‘focussed on the processes and practices constituting the everyday activities of organisational life and relating to strategic outcomes’ (Clegg et al., 2011a: 27).

Evans (2009: 227) has noted that marketing constitutes one of the core strategic considerations of tourism firms, providing one of the primary mechanisms whereby businesses can seek to develop a competitive advantage over their rivals. As will be described further in the next section, mechanisms for strategic positioning including market segmentation and product placement are already established spheres of interest in many existing tourism marketing texts. In the present book we wish to expand on this existing body of knowledge and consider the theoretical underpinnings of concepts such as the ephemeral experience, a concept that is so fundamental to the marketing of iconic experiences in national parks but one that is also underpinned by a complex history of stakeholder interactions since the early years of the parks movement.

‘A marketing strategy represents an internally integrated but externally focussed set of choices about how the firm addresses its customers in the context of a competitive environment’ (Clegg et al., 2011a: 150). Through the present book we will pursue a philosophy of pushing the boundaries of tourism marketing knowledge. In doing so, we will aim a new lens on many established marketing concepts, a lens which we acknowledge owes much of its development to the impact of fields including geography and sociology. In the next section we will expand on some of the links between tourism marketing and business strategy.

Strategy and Marketing (as Practice), and Tourism in National Parks

In 1962 Alfred DuPont Chandler, Professor of Business History at John Hopkins University and the Harvard University Business School, wrote that organisational strategy [of which we would argue marketing is a core component (see Ruekert, 1992) is a product of environmental change; ‘a response to the opportunities and needs created by changing population[s] and changing national income and by technological innovation’ (Chandler, 1990: 15). The concept of environmental change affecting corporate practice has been a recurring theme throughout much of the literature on national parks and national park management. The world’s first national park, Yellowstone National Park, was created in 1872 in part as a response to the opening up of the state of Montana to gold prospectors in the 1860s (Runte, 1997). Similarly, the 1916 National Parks Service Organic Act, which gave legislative provision to the creation of the United States National Park Service is said to have emerged from the confluence of a range of environmental forces – ‘the religious naturalism of Thoreau and Emerson, romanticism in the arts and early nostalgia for what was obviously the end of untamed wilderness’ (Sax, 1980: 7). Each of these iconic events is characteristic of what the present authors would describe as an increasing appreciation of symbiotic complexity; an appreciation amongst park managers that their concerns cannot simply be for the altruistic fulfilment of desired recreational experiences. Instead, through the signing of a range of legislative instruments (the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the 1979 Archaeological Resources Protection Act etc.), national park managers have shown an increasing appreciation of the complexities of ecological sustainability and the need to consider the future of industries like tourism in their broader environmental context.

Perhaps nowhere has the growing importance of ecologically sustainable park management been more evident than at the recently completed International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Parks Congress in Sydney Australia (November 2014). The Promise of Sydney Vision, which was endorsed by the more than 6000 conference participants from 160 countries, affirmed a promise to ‘rebalance’ the relationship between human society and nature. This was to be achieved in part through the promotion of sustainable land uses such as tourism. Marketing is a fundamental component of a competitive strategy for tourism destination development (see Evans, 2009) including in national parks. Encompassing the processes whereby buyers and sellers come together for the exchange of products and services; marketing has for many years formed a core component of a number of key tourism textbooks, monographs and journal papers (e.g. Buhalis, 2000; Clarke et al., 2013; Dickman, 1999; Gilmore & Simmons, 2007; Hall, 2014; Heath & Wall, 1991; Krippendorf, 1987; Middleton, 1998; Pike, 2004; Witt & Moutinho, 1994). The recently published Routledge Handbook of Tourism Marketing has called for greater sophistication in the tourism industry’s engagement with marketing topics to reflect the industry’s growing importance in international business. Such a prioritisation is not without justification. Balmford et al. (2015) recently estimated that there are roughly 8 billion global visits to protected areas per year, visitation that provides approximately US$600 billion in direct in-country expenditure and a US$250 billion consumer surplus. At a more local scale, Wilton and Nickerson’s (2006) showed that in 2001, 76% of travel expenditure in the US state of Montana was focused on the region’s natural features, with the Glacier National Park being the most pr...