tourism destination marketing part 2
TRANSCRIPT
Tourism Destination Marketing
Part 2
Major Operations
1. Assessing the current market(s) and forecasting future ones
2. Auditing the destination and analysing its appeal to the markets
3. Developing strategic objectives and a marketing mix
4. Creating an organisation for implementing the objectives
5. Carrying them out and evaluating the results
Assessing markets
• Who are the visitors?
• Who will future visitors be?
• Why are they likely to come?
• What will they do?
Research
• Counts of all individuals entering or leaving the country
• Interviews at frontiers with a sample of those entering and departing
• Self-completion questionnaires
• Sample surveys of population of a country
• Accommodation nights and arrivals recorded by individual accommodation providers
Forecasting
• Exploratory forecasting: looking at past trends and projecting them into the future
• Speculative forecasting: qualitative approach, based on predictions made by informed experts
• Normative forecasting: tourism organisation sets targets eg. visitor numbers, expected revenue – then works out tactics to meet them
• Integrative forecasting: integrates the results from other forecasting methods
Forecasting
Forecasting is more art than science and
cannot be relegated to a mechanical data-
crunching activity. A forecaster needs to
become involved with the data to detect
changing patterns.
Geurts, 1982
Destination Life Cycle
• TALC
– Exploration
– Involvement
– Development
– Consolidation
– Stagnation
– Decline or rejuventation
Destination Auditing
• In order to ensure the destination capacity will cope with forecast visitors these questions need to be asked:
– What is there?
– What is thought to be there?
– What has been represented as being there?
What is there?
• Physical attractions
• Socio cultural resources
• Infrastructure
• Accommodation
What is thought to be there?
• Destination image
– Usually stereotyped
– Images are more differentiated and complex to previous visitors than non visitors
– Older established destinations images are more affected by non-promotional communication
– Word of mouth affects image more than most other influences
Destination Image cont.
• Well established images are hard to change and require heave investment to do so
• Its is often the media rather than advertising which most influences destination image
• Destination images may vary with different audiences
• Destination images vary inter-regionally
Destination Branding
• Difficult to do because:
– Not a homogenous product
– Destination marketers cannot set prices or control the distribution system, branding has to rely totally on promotion or publicity
– Difficult to make one brand appeal to all
Marketing Strategy
• Difficult to position a destination because the destination marketer does not have control over individual tourism businesses and products
• Need to target a variety of groups to a destination to ensure maximum visits
• Destination may mean different things to different groups of visitors
Marketing Mix
• Difficult as the destination marketer does not have control over the products within the destination nor with the associated prices and distribution
• The majority of destinations marketing input occurs in the promotion of the destination