Handbook On Tourism Destination Branding

Tourism has become one of the world's fastest growing economic sectors in recent years. Governments around the world are increasingly recognising the power of tourism to boost their nation's development and prosperity. As more tourism destinations emerge and competition for visitors becomes more intense, a destination's ability to project itself on the world stage and differentiate itself from others is ever more important. Recognising the value of successfully building and managing a destination's brand, the European Travel Commission (ETC) and World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) have commissioned this Handbook to provide a useful and practical guide for both marketing novices and experienced destination managers. The Handbook on Tourism Destination Branding provides a step-by-step guide to the branding process accompanied by strategies for brand management. Case studies are featured throughout the Handbook to illustrate the various concepts, present best practices from destinations around the world and provide fresh insight into destination branding. The Handbook concludes with a section on evaluating brand impact and a set of practical recommendations.

'Destination Marketing' provides a clear framework for designing, implementing and monitoring a competitive strategy based on integrated marketing communications.

This textbook shows how cities, regions and countries adopt branding strategies similar to those of leading household brand names in an effort to differentiate themselves and emotionally connect with potential tourists. It asks whether tourist destinations get the reputations they deserve and uses topical case studies to discuss brand concepts and challenges. It tackles how place perceptions are formed, how cities, regions and countries can enhance their reputations as creative, competitive destinations, and the link between competitive identity and strategic tourism policy making.

In today's highly competitive market, many destinations - from individual resorts to countries - are adopting branding techniques similar to those used by 'Coca Cola', 'Nike' and 'Sony' in an effort to differentiate their identities and to emphasize the uniqueness of their product. By focusing on a range of global case studies, Destination Branding demonstrates that the adoption of a highly targeted, consumer research-based, multi-agency 'mood branding' initiative leads to success every time.

Academic studies have predominantly treated destination branding as a marketing phenomenon that happens to involve tourists as customers in a marketplace. This title attempts to free branding research and practice in tourism from the shackles of marketing that are dominated by the conventional approach of product, price, place, and promotion.

Now in its second edition, Contemporary Tourism: an international approach presents a new and refreshing approach to the study of tourism, considering issues such as the changing world order, destination marketing, tourism ethics, pro-poor tourism and implications for the patterns and flow of tourism in the future.

This primer demystifies branding, demonstrates how to reveal a destination brand, and provides real world examples, as well as affordable, proven tools, templates and checklists to help breathe life into a small city brand.

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Tourism - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, University of Applied Sciences Heide, language: English, abstract: Destinations are one of the tourism industries biggest brands. Nowadays, travelers are overwhelmed with places, which fit in their holiday scheme. The tourism market is crowded by destinations and the outcome is the substitutability of places. (Pike, 2005) Destination branding is a way to differentiate a destination from its existing competitors. Branding a country is a complex and multilevel business. One of the core aspects in destination branding is to identify and differentiate a destination through to a positive destination image. The destination image is a crucial part in the travelers' decision making process and verifiable influence the tourist behavior. Therefore the destination image has become one of the major concepts in destination marketing. Special focus is given to the destination image theory, which is a major aspect in destination branding. (Echtner & Ritchie, 2003; Qu et al., 2011; Wang & Pizam, 2011) Just as product brands, destination brands are living entities. They have to be managed continuously and changed over time, to ensure a fit to environmental changes. (Wang & Pizam, 2011) Sweden has therefore developed a national branding and sales strategy for the tourism industry to implement until 2020 and fully launched in 2013. (Gaßmann, 2013) A part of this strategy is the creation of special themes to present a holistic Sweden image and destination brand. (Communication Guide, 2013) Among others, this strategy will be used to compare the presented and advertised Sweden image with the image perception on the German source market, to analyze compliance or incongruity. Germany is an interesting and important source market for the Swedish tourism industry. According to the research of the UNWTO, Germany is one of the biggest spenders in the tourism industry in 2011 (UNWTO, 2012). Based to the results from IBIS, the Swedish Border Survey about foreign visitors in Sweden, Germany hold the fourth place, after Norway, Finland and Denmark considering the amount of travelers to the country in 2011, with 1.796.016 visitors (IBIS, 2012). Taking this into account, presenting a positive, fitting and attractive country image has to be one of Sweden's main aims. [...]

The internet and other new technologies have changed the tourism industry in an unprecedented way, and keeping pace has become challenging. Online information is now one of the primary influences on consumer decisions in nearly all major markets. For example, 41 per cent of tourists arriving in Spain in 2007 had booked through the internet, and in the United States the number of trips bought online exceeded those purchased offline. Such changes are impacting and influencing the way destinations and companies manage and market themselves.