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Karikoga Kaseke

Tinashe Makichi Business Reporter
Zimbabwe has won the African Rising Star Country Branding Award from Bloom Consulting, a Spanish-based strategy consulting firm, which specialises in National Branding. The accolade is given to a destination that shows extraordinary improvement on the tourism growth rate and enhanced focus on brand strategy.

According to a report released by the Bloom Consulting firm, Zimbabwe won the Rising Star Award having moved five places up from position 18 to position 13 out of 37 African countries evaluated.

Zimbabwe Tourism Authority chief executive Mr Karikoga Kaseke paid tribute to the advocates and custodians of the brand Zimbabwe who continue to work towards promoting the brand across major tourism markets.

“We are excited to be a recipient of this high status award. This achievement means a lot especially from a destination marketing point of view and its an indication that brand Zimbabwe has a bright future We will take seriously the citation by Bloom Consulting firm particularly areas where we are not doing well as a destination so that we can further improve our brand equity.

“Such areas include digital demand and online performance, we are already seized with those issues and working on them. We are optimistic that we will consolidate our fine performance and further improve to top ten in three years’ time,” said Mr Kaseke.

“As a sector we will invest efforts in identifying areas of strategic joint marketing with various partners and stakeholders in order to further increase our brand visibility across all source markets.”

According to Bloom Consulting, the overall purpose for the ranking is to measure the performance and effectiveness of each country brand from a tourism perspective.

The measurement tool (algorithm methodology) which was used for these awards was premised mainly on four variables namely economic performance, digital demand, country branding strategy rating and online performance.

Economic performance looked at the country’s success to achieve financial gain from the international visitors. This was derived from data indications circulated by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation on tourism receipts, that is, tourism receipts growth rate for over a five year period (2008 – 2012).

Digital demand searches for the total online search volume for tourism related activities and attractions within each of the countries evaluated. The more online tourism related activities a country had the more appealing the brand is considered to be.

The Country Branding Strategy rating evaluated the accuracy of the strategy by each National Tourism Organisation for all the countries through the comparative analysis of brand tags as measured by the digital demand tool (40 brand tags grouped in five key topics: Culture, Leisure, Outdoors, Niche Markets and Target Markets).