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1. Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Can a country be marketed? Can we manage and treat a country like a brand of product? This question may be difficult to answer since “Sell a country?” may become the first problematic issue encountered. However, more and more people nowadays start to relate the concept of brand not only with products or companies but also with countries. Indeed, countries, like consumer brands, also need to compete with other country brands for reputation, tourists or investments. Thus, branding becomes an effective way to differentiate themselves from others. With this emerging phenomenon of country branding around the world, it is generally agreed by
academics as well as practitioners that countries can be branded and marketed as other consumer goods or services (e.g., Ham, 2001; Kotler, 2002), although there exist some fundamental differences in between.
Based on the idea of country as a brand, Anholt (2003) developed a “Nation Brand Hexagon.” According to this model, “the nation brand is the sum of people’s perceptions of a country across six areas of national competence, including tourism, export, governance, investment and immigration, culture and heritage, and people (Anholt, 2005, p.297).” Among the six dimensions of the hexagon, tourism is often the most visible promoted aspect of the nation brand and the images formed from tourism promotion of country have a much stronger impact on people’s perceptions toward a country as a whole (Anholt, 2003).
Indeed, tourism industry is one of the most rapid growing economic activities around the world. It can benefit a country by increasing its foreign exchange and also
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國立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
creating job opportunities. According to World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC)1, the contribution of Travel and Tourism to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to reach 9.5% (US$10,478 billion) and create near 300 million jobs opportunities by 2019. In addition, World Tourism Organization (WTO)2 forecasts the international tourist arrivals are expected to reach nearly 1.6 billion by 2020, indicating the great potential tourism contributes to the development of national economy.
Since the huge profit involved in tourism industry, more and more countries recognize the importance of tourism marketing and start to include it into their national development plan. For example, in 1999 New Zealand promoted its tourism brand by implementing the campaign, “100% pure New Zealand,” which has been considered as one of the most successful destination branding activities (Morgan et al., 2002). Back to Taiwan, in 2002 the Administrative Yuan proposed “Doubling
Tourists Arrivals Plan,” which aimed at doubling the tourist arrivals to 2 million and raising the total numbers of visitor arrivals up to 5 million in 2008. However, the plan failed by only reaching 3.84 million in 2008, although it has grown by 3.4%
compared to the previous year. The government attributes the failure mainly to the global financial crisis, which decreases people’s willingness and ability to travel around. In fact, according to WTTC, growth of tourism in a few years is expected to slow down, but it also stresses that this expansion is still healthy given the economic difficulty and in the future the contribution of tourism will still increase. Concerning the current global economy, Taiwan government revises the goal down to 4.25 million tourist arrivals in 2009, and thus launches the latest plan, “Tour Taiwan Years
2008-2009.”
With global economic recession, competition between each country for attracting
1 World Travel and Tourism Council http://www.wttc.org/
2 World Tourism Organization http://www.unwto.org/index.php
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國立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
tourists becomes even violent. How to develop an effective and powerful strategy to market countries becomes a critical issue for many nation leaders. Moreover,
marketing countries needs to consider the complexity of international settings and global communications. Therefore, the application of Globally Integrated marketing communications (GIMC) may be seen as an effective way to address this issue. GIMC, the modification and extension of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), coordinates not only the vertical dimensions of promotion disciplines (i.e. advertising, brand management, public relation, etc.) as in IMC, but also the horizontal
dimensions in terms of organizations and countries (Grein and Gould, 1996). In this way, GIMC may have the potential for strategically managing global promotions of countries.
1.2 Research Purpose
Given the increasing importance of tourism industry to national economy, this research aims at analyzing to what degree the global communications of Taiwan’s tourism brand is integrated during the current campaign “Tour Taiwan Years
2008-2009” from the perspective of GIMC. By doing so, two purposes are served. On one hand, the deficiencies of the marketing strategy can be detected and improved in the future. Although Taiwan government has tried to promote Taiwan as an island of tourism since 2000 by proposing “Taiwan’s New Tourism Development Strategies for the 21st Century,” little attention has been paid to the global communications of
Taiwan tourism in the academic field. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the current structure of Taiwan’s tourism industry as well as its marketing strategies and
executions. In this regard, these analyses can serve as the basis and suggestions for Taiwan’s tourism policy in the future.
On the other hand, the current research also tries to bridge the gap in academic
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filed by exploring the application of GIMC to tourism destination marketing. Since GIMC is a much newer concept, it receives insufficient discussions either in theory or in practice. Besides, until now there is no research examining country tourism
promotions from the perspective of GIMC. Therefore, by conducting a case study on Taiwan’s global promotions of tourism industry, this research also hopes to contribute to the literatures of GIMC.
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國立 政 治 大 學