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Dr Musekiwa Tapera
BUILDING on the inherent values of a brand should be the core of any branding strategy. National values should be known across the country and those values should become evi­dent to everyone in contact with the country’s citizens especially to visitors, prospective visi­tors and business investors.

A country’s citizenry should consistently and accurately represent the values of the brand.

Destination stakeholders similarly should share in the vision of the brand and be able to communicate its values to prospective tourists, investors and other stakeholder interests.

Research and brand audit

The setting up of values begins the brand promotion process which forms the foun­dation of the success of the nation brand. The nation or destination branding process requires objective and comprehensive brand­ing research to establish clarity on the brands strengths and weaknesses, the target audience and the competitive environment.

It is argued that understanding a destina­tions target market and what they want is key to developing a winning brand. In the context of Zimbabwe’s tourism, research on the needs and wants of tourists from major source markets is critical to come up with a winning brand.

This argument is in sync with issues of per­ceptual mapping and effective target market and audience analysis in order to clearly craft winning destination branding strategies. Pro­fessional qualitative and quantitative research is needed to interrogate how the nation/des­tination brand is perceived internationally by the target market and in own country by its own citizens.

Research findings are subjected to some analysis and shared with experts, players and stakeholders to come up with appropriate strat­egies and approaches for effective destination branding.

Competitor analysis

The next step would be to carry out a com­petitor analysis to determine what the compet­itor offerings are like. Branding in tourism is about differentiation and this can be built on identifying and focusing on the

Unique Selling Proposition of the destina­tion.

Ultimately a brand identity has to be con­structed. Brand strategy involves building and managing the brand to differentiate the destination from its competitors by adding value for tourists.

Competitor analysis is a critical element in the branding process as it analyses the perfor­mance of competitors in order to craft strat­egies to out compete them and consolidating own position.

Dhawan to corroborate on the above asser­tions argues that emotional associations are built over time through good branding practice and a time tested relationship between the des­tination and its customers based on intrigue, trust, understanding and support.

To create a brand promise that leads to such emotional connection, it should be grounded in the brands core values, clearly relevant and engaging to the target market, able to create some sort of positive emotional attachment beyond just being “good’’, adaptable to the busi­ness market climate continually, reinforced, known and echoed by business partners (stake­holders) repeated internally and externally.

Destinations can benefit a lot from this approach by recognising the fact that brand­ing strategy is long term, customer focused, adaptable and stakeholder — driven for own­ership purposes.

Destination management and leadership

Destination management is very important for destination branding purposes. Destina­tion management is confronted with great challenge of keeping the location progressive, attract new place development and investment to the location.

It is also important for existing business and residents to be kept content and satisfied. This implies that with new competition rules due to globalisation, old tactics and worn out approaches have to be replaced with soft new “clever” managerial methods for the develop­ment of the destination’s product and needs of its customers.

For example in the global context of yester­year, it was adequate for destinations just to promote the existing place package.

Today the new product needs to be devel­oped and changed according to the destina­tion’s customers’ needs requiring managerial skills than ever before.

It is argued that with the tools linked to what is termed, the soul of the place, identity and image and favourable associations can be created for a place to attract new businesses and visitors to the location, thus increasing the value of the place.

Central to destination branding, is building the identity of the place which is the active part of management in the process. Strategic alliances with other locations can decisively increase the joint-value of all partners who all could be in a win-win situation.

Leadership and partnerships: Government & private sector partnership

Destinations using leadership to manage the place resources in the complete destina­tion marketing process are winners. Passively behaving locations will lose their competitive edge.

To be continued