Nowadays the tourism sector is one of the most important economic sectors. The globalization of our world allows for better, easier, faster, and cheaper travel, and the technological progress achieved has left almost no place unknown.
We may observe that many destinations are now featuring in people's conversations. This is true for cities (urban areas) such as London, Paris, New-York or Hong-Kong which illustrate the new trend. Other destinations adopt different strategies and there it is the country which becomes a destination, such as Spain, Australia, New Zealand or India.
This relationship between brand management and tourism management is an interesting problematic of marketing. This paper will try to understand this relationship, its nature, components and consequences.
In the first part we will study the concept of destination branding and the role of Destination Marketing Organizations. In the second part we will look at the tourist destination choices and the role of Destination Branding in influencing this choice. The third part will deal with the tourist experience and introduce the hypothesis of destination branding. Does destination branding by cities or countries really reach the customers?
This report shows how marketing principles can be applied successfully to tourism management, and how a better brand strategy replaces heavy and aggressive communication.
[...] The infrastructure in destination branding would be the hotel, the size of the rooms, the supplementary services, the restaurant menu, the friendliness of employees etc. All factors these are factors that influence the retail industry. It is well known that sound researches are done before the opening of a shop in order to target precisely the right customer. For instance, a shop in England will have to be more spacious than one in Spain or France because English people pay much more attention to the space they have, since they are not really willing to be in contact with other customers. [...]
[...] As we have seen with sustainable development which participates in developing third world countries by allowing them to trade with the most developed countries, the example of sustainable tourism illustrates the destination branding of the future. Destinations such as Central American countries use destination branding and strong social and environmental values to attract tourists with the goal of developing the country and the quality of life of its population positively through intelligent tourism management. References Websites Interbrand Corporation www.interbrand.com (brand consultancy offering strategy, corporate identity, naming and product design) The Best Global Brands by Value; 2005 www.interbrand.com/best_brands_2005.asp Brand Channel www.brandchannel.com (online exchange about branding; provides hundreds of articles on brand topics) All About Branding www.allaboutbranding.com (provides extensive resources and opinions on branding including brand development, management and communications). [...]
[...] We now need to understand how a tourist chooses his destination, if we want to stress the importance of using brand management in the tourism industry. The objective of Tourism management has, for a long time, been the understanding of the tourism customer's behavior. It is composed of feelings, perceptions and preferences. Tourism management has sought to define tourists' preferences with the use of a map of consumers' preferences (Seddighi, Theochaurous, 2002). The aim of such a map is to determine how a change in the attributes being promoted- being already tested and thus known to be good attributes- would affect the demand. [...]
[...] The literature proposes a list of them as follows: source: Hankinson Journal of Services Marketing The key clusters of brand attributes are, in order of importance, physical environment, economic activity, business tourism facilities, accessibility, social facilities, strength of reputation, characteristics of people, and size (Hankinson, 2005). The impact of culture is also very important. These attributes will produce an emotional reaction which in turn will create distinctiveness of the destination. The problematic of partners should be solved through a strong idea of coordination to help build up the identity of the destination. [...]
[...] We have evoked here the elements of overall life satisfaction in an ascending manner, in a tourism management approach. The tourist experience is composed of all these elements. A market research (McKercher, Wong, Lau, 2005) was conducted in Hong-Kong which sought to understand the tourist experience. One important remark that could be made about this research is that tourists of urban areas were bothered by pollution and congestion and their experience was really negative. They could not wait to go back home and during their stay they tried to visit some remote places to find some natural beauty that they were used to and they actually wanted to experience during their trip iii. [...]
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