Poetics and politics of destination branding: Rebranding Zimbabwe 2010

Abstract

Most destination branding literature ignore the poetics and the actual exercise of destination branding only dwelling much on the promotion of brands. Again many branding and destination branding studies fail to distil some unique challenges between place and product branding and their inspiration comes from general marketing literature. The researcher outlines a conceptual framework for developing a destination brand namely the dialogic perspective to destination branding which accentuates social multiplicity and complexity in destination branding and this will be applied on the Zimbabwean 2010 rebranding context. Using the dialogic perspective Zimbabwe`s branding process is evaluated and the analysis and evaluation of destination brand poetics was done using available destination management models and also by drawing comparisons with other African destinations brands. The goal was to highlight the politics and poetics of destination branding in Zimbabwe and to achieve this; an explorative research design was adopted. Data was gathered through key informant face to face interviews, online questionnaire surveys, literature search and content analysis of destination marketing materials. Sampling was largely non- probability convenient sampling. Major results shows that strategic and creative brand execution, funding, lack of promotional efforts, lack of co-branding and lack of collaboration to destination branding are the major changes to the success of destination branding in Zimbabwe. A major recommendation is that Zimbabwe adopts broader collaboration in destination branding to ease off these challenges. As a conclusion there is need to study destination branding in the economic and social contexts in which they exist and this paper also opens up possible areas for further research.