Today, in a globalized connected world, Nations, cities, destinations are in a continuous competition with international rivals to define their place and value among others. It’s no longer valid for cities to stand still in such competition, depending on their basic momentum of their resources to position themselves in such global contest. Branding is an essential part of the economic sustainable development of a city and marketing it as a destination for tourism.
Heritage plays a central role in creating destination brand, as heritage, with its tangible and intangible qualities is a prime factor in brand creation. This paper will be discussing the role of the heritage in its brand creation in its symbolic and identity inherits. This will be executed by exploring the definitions and strategies of destination branding, its elements and means to create such brand and the contemporary means the heritage is presented on the online space.
In today’s consumerist society, and with the fast pace of the globalization, global societies are faced with notions of insecurity, and loss of identity and belonging. Here oscillates the tendency towards the search for markers of identification .today, the economic and political values are in continuous change and are effected with large number of parameters that are altered with the slightest change in everyday events worldwide. The global inter connectivity has resulted in a vast culture of copy and significant loss of identity on all levels. This pushes individuals to seek their own identities and try to position themselves within this unified singular world. Earlier, social values and identities were formed by religion or nationhood, withal the accompanying cultural, political and ideological implications. Nowadays, economic consumerist values prevails and thus social individuality is defined by the branding of products, as the brands, in such economic context, is the only way to belong to a certain cluster of values. Brands bring into focus ways of identification that surpass cultural, traditional, and local differences. a brand then signifies a kind of intangible model to identify a system of values shared by bigger groups of people and societies regardless to their location, religion or nation . The stockpiled heritage of a place or a destination is already an important definer for the group of individuals living in this place and acts as the significant image that distinguishes this place in such global realm of replication. Each city or a destination stands alone depending on these values that are not to be found in others and the heritage, physical or cultural, represents these values. This paper will be discussing the role of the heritage as a brand element that has a direct effect on the nourishment of the place or city as a branded destination, attracting visitors or residents to share these values on various levels. The paper will explore the idea of branding in general and the development of a brand position, and how the heritage fulfills the characteristics of brand element. Heritage as a brand element is directly linked to the practice of tourism. Tourism defines the main activity that impacts and gets benefit from the Heritage economically. In this context the study will not be addressing the tourism as an economic complex activity; rather it will focus on the perception of the tourist and mechanisms of how the tourist is affected by the image of a certain city or destination. In this discourse, it’s important to address the effect of the information technology and the digital space on such process . The study will be exploring the online place branding process and how
This change on the idea of branding could be understood as the result of cultural fragmentation and pluralism coupled with a fast-paced capitalist consumerism, where developed societies are experiencing increasing insecurity that often oscillates between a desire for belonging and profound disorientation. And within pluralistic societies that signals of identification take on critical importance.
Brands and branding have been defined variously through literature
From the previous definitions, It could be understood that Branding is an act of identification in the first place, where the marketers through different branding elements and strategies try to give a distinctive identity for a product, and the consumer at the other end, try to be belonged to group of people who share the same interest in this product thus identify himself as part of a cult.
Cities are no different from products in terms of branding. The goal of Branding a product in the first place is to differentiate it from others and define its competitive edge, similarly, places in general including cities, adopt the concepts of destination branding to have the same distinction among other cities. Today, the world is connected like never before, and the culture of copy became the dominant feature of the era. It became a necessity for cities to highlight their differentiating qualities and promote their position via branding. In fact, cities hold the very basic elements of a brand, and they are already perceived by people, even if unconsciously, as a brand
The physical heritage of a city the falls under what to be considered brand symbol. The brand symbol is the identifier that symbolizes the brand. The brand symbol can be a visual symbol such as sign or logo, or it can be verbal in a form of a slogan or tagline. In all cases, the brand symbol is a tangible brand element. The heritage fits very well in this category, as the physical heritage of a city is in all cases very distinctive than any other city. Each city, even if shared the same historical and political influences, has developed its own kind of physical structure even if similar to others. Yet, when it comes to heritage site or place, it will remain a very unique symbol. This is the main characteristic of the brand symbol, distinction.
On another level, for a successful brand, developing a brand positioning is very important
In this context, the heritage has a stored potential of filling this area. As the heritage have the ability to create the idiosyncratic position of the city with the accumulated symbolic meaning that it carried over the years. If the consumer in this case is the city visitor, then by witnessing an encounter with a physical heritage site, it would fulfill his desires of experiencing the proximity with the heritage and meet his embedded perceptions that have been formulated about this city. If any of names of the cities of successful brands is mentioned, such as Paris, London, Cairo or Rome, a stored image of this city will evoke, including one of its heritage landmarks. The mind searches for a symbol to define this perception, which in all adds up to its intangible value.
It’s then clarified that one of the important target groups that the city brand is after is the visitor or the tourist. The way this brand is conveyed to this group is merely a virtual visual one. This arouses a necessity of understanding the method the tourist encounter the city brand , not referring to obsolete ways , but taking in consideration the contemporary ways a brand city consumer deals with the city, which involves a deeper study of the effect of the information technologies and the virtual space on this. Even on a strategic level, the information induced to set the actions for the positioning and marketing the city, positioning its brand amongst others as in Anholt GFK index is dependent on the study of the virtual space, which will be looked upon closely through the rest of the paper
With the rise of the mass transportation means and the appearance of low cost carriers on one hand, and the rise of the communication technologies and social media, greater masses of people are now able to be more mobile and able to experience such encounters with the heritage sites around the globe in much easier way, and the heritage sites are now much more exposed through the internet posts and imagery. Today, instead of taking a car from one of the cities in Europe or even the middle east to visit the capital, now you can easily take a flight from Dubai to Cairo or from an English village to Berlin with almost the same amount of money or at sometimes even cheaper. Websites like Booking.com or Trivago made it completely easy to plan your own vacation on a personal computer, depending on the intriguing images that one has been exposed to over the internet or via visitors reviews to various places, a stream that was not available before resulting in huge traffic of information and specially images about a place or a destination. Such a practice resulted in a furious competition between cities that are defined as tourist’s destinations
The theory of tourist gaze discussed in his book the tourist gaze
The theory of the tourist gaze is applicable with the rise of the mass tourism that evolved since the second half of the 19th century; this is closely aligned with the development of the photography industry, as photos of the touristic sites became available by travelers and on tourist guides, advertisements then through various media. By taking pictures of places that were no longer used, ‘sites’ were turned into ‘sights’: tourists started to visit churches, not to pray, but to photograph them
Today, we cannot neglect or oversee the internet governance over the flow of information and how our decisions are taken, whether forming a political view, or buying a product, or aspiring to visit a city or a place. The virtual world on the different internet platforms , social media, websites and blogs not even competes the physical real one, but exceeds it in affecting branding of products and specially places , since branding, as previously explained is intended to construct this mental association between the consumer and the product (place) based on the perception that is dependent on the distinctiveness of such product exhibited through symbols, images as tangible elements of branding and intangible ones like word of mouth, resulting in a kind of a desire of belonging to a certain idea around the product. The place branding specifically is to a great extent could be dependent on the virtuallity of this place over the cyber space, as the mainly the images of such places are almost completely virtual. The main source of information about such places now comes through the word of mouth on social media or peer reviews on travel websites
The stated above does not mean that advisement is an obsolete mean of place branding. Advertisement would still act as the catalyst agent that ignites the hype from which the virtual means stated would take over. To understand such mechanism, first we have to acknowledge that place branding is an image influenced practice
The elements of this process could be analyzed against the framework suggested by Simon Anholt regarding the Competitive identity of “Strategy, Substance and Symbolic Actions”
The Heritage as clarified before is an image based element of branding. Its presence on the cyber space and how it’s exhibited would affect completely the city brand. Although the information technologies and internet social platforms might offer a wider understanding of the city experience, yet, a heritage landmark still holds a prominent position when it comes to the general brand of the city. As an example, Paris has one brand asset which is uniquely valuable: the Eiffel Tower. This landmark is one of the few truly global mega brands in the Anholt GMI City Brands Index, a landmark of iconic status which is spontaneously associated with Paris by nearly 80 per cent of all respondents worldwide . The presence of such a prominent and distinctive visual symbol is certainly one reason why Paris does so well in the rankings
Today, in a globalized connected world, Nations, cities, destinations and corporates are in a continuous competition with international rivals to define their place and value among others. In case of cities and destinations , which stand as the platform where the economic and cultural interactions occurs, it’s no longer valid to stand still in such competition , depending on their basic momentum of their resources to position themselves in such global contest. From here the importance of adopting more intent “Branding” strategies appears. Branding is an essential and integral part of the economic sustainable development of a city and marketing it as a destination for visiting and residing.
Heritage plays a central role in creating place or destination brand, as heritage, with its physical tangible and intangible qualities is considered a prime factor in brand creation from a marketing point of view. Branding depends on creating a unique character of the commodity or the destination, with a powerful symbol or logo to define it. Thus, heritage could be treated as that symbol which is a main component in the brand formation and it represents one of the main factors of forming the identity both physically and mentally of the city or the community. This is the competitive edge in making a city or destination stand out between its global competitors. Understanding the new methods the image of this heritage is exhibited in various means and on the top of the list the web space becomes a necessity to keep up in the competition, opening new opportunities for the heritage to stand out again as city symbols.