Today, there are thousands and thousands of tourist destinations, with too many offers vying for attention. There is virtually no locality in Italy where local administrators and businesspeople are not stressing the potential of their territory for tourism. Being confident in one's own possibilities is OK, but it's not enough to persuade the market of the attractiveness of one's proposition. Any marketing of places must provide a persuasive answer to the question: "Why should a tourist come here and not elsewhere?". When a convincing motivation for tourist demand is found, a winning positioning strategy for tourism can usually be found.
A basic move to be implemented is to decrease the substitutability of a given territory, in order to attract meaningful consumer demand. Therefore competitive identity comes into play as a key strategic asset. The peculiar elements of the identity of a given territory and its people are the distinctive features that make it unique, even within the same market segment. Genus loci, i.e. the peculiar identity of a town or region, is what really drives tourism today. And the identity of a place is the complex outcome of its resources, traditions, lifestyles, which alone can differentiate its supply of tourist services on the global marketplace. Increasingly, tourism is not about travel and accommodation, but a path of discovery of a given territory accomplished with the help of local communities. Territorial and experiential marketing thus have to come together, as they do in the best practices in the promotion of tourism and branding of places. Building competitive identity is about implementing marketing campaigns that not only offer resources and facilities, but communicate feelings and experiences, since tourism is more and more an "emotional" good. Comparatively few localities in Italy and elsewhere are up to the challenges and opportunities involved.
by Magda Antonioli,
Director of the Master in the Economics of Tourism, Università Bocconi