Destination Marketing

To be competitive, destinations engage in "destination marketing" which aims to attract investments, tourism, and desirable residents through the provision of a portfolio of benefits and activities. It can offer one single line or a match of different lines in order to achieve a specialised or general destination profile. The number of attractions comprised in a line determines the line's depth, while the broadness of the product-mix is given by the number of products lines supplied by a destination. A broad gamma of products increases the attracting power of a destination being able to satisfy more demand needs. The inclusion of events into this wide portfolio of activities and attractions is an excellent way to showcase the unique characteristics of the host environment and selling the image of the event includes the marketing of the properties of the destination. Event portfolios are often designed and they can play such an important role that many cities often give an event-related title to their name in order to strengthen their image in a strategic perspective.

In fact, (on the strategic side), destinations with attractive schedules gain a competitive advantage over those with no events to display: where there are no major attractions, events can be critical to create a positive image in a region. A new event can target a wide and various audience: many people are already in the location, but it has to deal with other competing events on the area in that period. The risk is that the supply becomes too rich and every single event may be not able to get enough audience to sustain themselves. One solution to this problem may be the differentiation and a strong positioning in the audience perceptions. Of course, though, as in any case of product or service launch, a careful analysis of the market, the potential and the trends has to be undertaken before any step is done.

Pursuing the final aim of promoting destination as a great place to travel, make business and live in, events achieve many different purposes related to the many actors they involve. Hence, development policies and marketing strategies have to take into consideration every category of players, and final events' evaluation can hardly be assessed on a sure and unique basis: there are many different criteria and parameters to judge the results and the balance of all costs and benefits.

All the stakeholders and aimed purposes will be illustrated more deeply in the case study.

Approaching this study we should start investigating the actions promoted by Government bodies and delegated agencies, that are usually the major supporters of destination development in an integrated and comprehensive perspective. An analysis (Duncan, 1995 ) suggests that their involvement and policy-making on the destination have different functions, since public bodies don't merely "own" the place neither should they arbitrarily make use of it. In this approach the community has great importance as consensus-giver to the local government as long as this acts on its behalf and benefit.

Local authorities should be the guardians of the destination image through marketing actions, and information delivery (i-sites, tourist centres...) both domestically and internationally. As well, they should act as regulators and set conditions and guidelines for a balanced development of the territory. They should invest in public structures, own and manage them directly or contracting private companies. In the end, but not last, through their specific functions of policy making, planning and visioning of the place development they should supply liaison to the different actors involved and give assistance to private investors.

Another relevant function that the government has to undertake is the promotion of the destination in a marketing attitude. In fact, as happens with structure investments, also in the marketing field private interests alone would not achieve the optimal level of spending due to the same reason, that is the not inclusion of social surplus in their economic evaluations.

As we have seen, the government has a number of functions with different levels of commitment, ranging from mere funding, investment in or ownership of structures, to direct management, all through information provision, promotion and co-ordination as well as planning and policy-making.

Duncan (1995 ) also suggests that especially in small townships and communities, the development of infrastructures (in number and quality) is primarily addressed to residents in order to develop the local network of facilities. Only in second analysis they are regarded as components that can make the site more attracting to visitors, increase their numbers and hopefully economic figures as well.

As the main impact will occur on the local community (investments remaining on the area and weighing on its balances), tourist participation can then be regarded as a pretext, but the evaluation process should be mainly focused on the long-term local impacts. Moreover, investments evaluation should be undertaken on a long-term horizon, also considering the time after the specific event or after the tourist allure has faded in a re-conversion approach of economy, investments and structures. This analysis should touch the environmental aspect, as well as the human resource and formation issue, or the risk that both economic and cultural incidence of tourists become too massive (see §.Project Evaluation).

A careful consideration for community needs is very important and can on reverse lead to community support generating resource transfer and

These strategies of image building and attractiveness construction are approached through common guidelines (Latusi, 2002 ), although they are addressed to different subjects and therefore they are different in the operational realisation.

In particular, paramount is the building of strategies that have to be oriented to a long-term, reciprocally advantageous relationship with the actors.

Secondly, the actors are active subjects and have to be considered as that. It means that their needs will be analysed in a dynamic perspective, as will their impacts on the development of the context and business environment.

Furthermore, on the other hand the action of the many local actors involved should be co-ordinated in order to achieve a strong and rich supply, able to make use of the many individual inputs to generate an integrated, polyedric network industry.

Considering the destination marketing itself, we can observe after Varaldo (2000 ) basically four different aims that can be included in the following chart.

C H A R T

All the functions and relationships

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