Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Managing Brand Equity
and quickly followed by
Building Strong Brands
(1995), it was argued that
destinations should promote their 'brand' in order to defi ne themselves with respect to their
competitors and to break through overwhelming clutters of information available through the
many channels. Essentially, the goal of branding was to exert some kind of 'control' over
the market place which was increasingly NOT 'controlled' by the destination marketing
organizations. Importantly, a new form of branding was achieved when tourism organizations
began defi ning a vital organizational structure within the destination as well as a 'place' within
the minds of existing and potential visitors. Unfortunately, it seems that many destination
branding efforts stopped short as they focused more on the slogan which could be used to best
represent the essential place (i.e. 'I love New York', 'Incredible India', 'Italy Much More', 'I feel
sLOVEnia') and less on creating the internal architecture needed to support the branded
destination.
Many recent studies suggest that destinations and their liaison
-
destination marketers - are
losing their ability to communicate effectively with travellers as a variety of online systems (e.g.
GDSs and CRSs) which exert control over a huge portion of the hotel, airline, cruise ship and
events markets. Search engines, including Google and Kayak, have increased their impact within
the online search market, and travel community websites and other forms of consumer generated
content such as TripAdvisor and Facebook become even more popular as travellers can overcome
the control that marketers seek to effect over traveller decisions. Indeed, many destination
marketing organizations have adjusted their focus to include managing their online reputations
based upon the assumption that brands can be hurt or even destroyed by the complaints of a
small number of visitors and 'Black Swan' events such as fl oods, hurricanes, wars and atomic
plant explosions. For example,
The Greek National Tourism Organization (GNTO)
recently
introduced 'True Greece', an Internet-based reputation management initiative which aims to
clarify any existing 'inaccuracies or speculations' regarding Greek tourism destinations (http://
www.aboutourism.com/online-reputation-management-destination-marketing-the-case-of-
greece/). It is argued that destination reputations should be a central focus as they are more
dynamic and therefore more easily managed across the various online platforms (Marchiori and
Cantoni 2012).
Focus on measurement and effi ciency
The new economic and political environment of the 1990s also forced destination marketing
organizations to examine their core functions and to consider alternative strategies for allocation
of budgets according to new measures of performance. The old strategies based upon 'intuition'
gave way to a variety of new paradigms based upon measurement and benchmarking. Perhaps
the most predominant of these efforts focused on advertising evaluation; led by Burke and
Gitelson (1990), Woodside (1990), Woodside, McDonald and Trappey (1997) and others
(McWilliams and Crompton 1997; Messmer and Johnson 1993) many destination marketing
organizations adopted a series of practices which enabled them to better rationalize their
advertising efforts. Beginning in the early to mid-1990s, however, DMOs began to recognize the
importance of evaluation in other areas of the marketplace such as destination competitiveness,
organization structure and service quality through benchmarking.
Perhaps the most widely recognized article (and later turned into a book) on destination
competitiveness was written by Crouch and Ritchie (1999), wherein they identifi ed a number
of dimensions which should be used to assess the competitiveness of the destination and the
destination organization. Zeithaml, Berry and Parasuraman (1990), on the other hand, outlined
the foundations for measuring service quality (through SERVQUAL), and offered a fi ve stage
