Abstract
In recent years, tourist destinations and strategies of place branding have been facing new challenges owing to the diffusion of Information and Communications technologies. Smart devices can give tourists/prosumers the possibility to co-create and share their travel experience to the point to influence the destination web reputation and, consequently, its digital place image and branding. Furthermore, new technologies can be also used as effective analytical tools to scrutinize the role of online co-created narratives in influencing the web reputation of a specific tourist site, natural heritage included. The study focuses on the online destination image of Mount Etna, an active volcano located in Southern Italy inserted in the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2017. The web reputation of this natural heritage site has been analyzed through a twofold methodology: a manual online content analysis and a software-based Sentiment Analysis methodology. The paper highlights the crucial role of new technologies both as tools of analysis in tourism and heritage studies and as “catalysts” of e-narratives able to influence place images. In so doing, the research aims at providing other researchers and policy-makers with new theoretical and methodological insights about the challenges and potentialities of smart technologies in exploring the online place image, thus contributing to a novel conceptualization of place branding through the theoretical/operational framework of Place Branding 3.0. In particular, the mixed-method approach represents an innovative framework insofar as it provides an in-depth evaluation of users’ online perceptions both at the “micro” scale—at the level of contents, through the manual content analysis—as well as at the “macro” scale, thanks to the software-based Sentiment Analysis methodology.
Highlights
Over the last few years, place branding strategies have been widely used at the different scales in order to enhance the tourist attractiveness of heritage sites and destinations in a growingly competitive tourism sector.As several scholars put it [1,2,3,4], while the mobilization of marketing techniques to “sell” places dates back at least to the 19th century, place branding is a rather new approach which mobilizes a wider repertoire of strategies and practices including coopting local stakeholders, creating internal consensus and attracting exogenous resources
Following Bosangit et al [32] (p. 2), who hold the view that “narratives are fundamental in the construction of tourism experiences”, we stress the need to take into account the variegated repertoire of narratives emerging from territories in order to build a coherent online destination image
In place branding strategies, both top-down institutional narratives and bottom-up narratives shaped by tourists and/or wannabe-tourists should be considered as crucial
Summary
Over the last few years, place branding strategies have been widely used at the different scales in order to enhance the tourist attractiveness of heritage sites and destinations in a growingly competitive tourism sector.As several scholars put it [1,2,3,4], while the mobilization of marketing techniques to “sell” places dates back at least to the 19th century, place branding is a rather new approach which mobilizes a wider repertoire of strategies and practices including coopting local stakeholders, creating internal consensus and attracting exogenous resources. New smart technologies have been recently upsetting patterns of re-territorialization, place experiences and narratives. This is especially evident in the tourism field, since tourist practices are suitable to be experienced through the new web-based technologies. A growing number of tourists rely on social media and mobile devices which allow the production and sharing of user’s generated contents (UGC). This happens in the pre-travel dreaming/planning/booking stage, but during the “on-site-experience” with the aim of gaining information, sharing “live” experiences and personalizing the trip [5,6,7,8]. Germann Molz [9] emphasizes that “over the past decade, the proliferation of Internet cafés, portable computers, mobile smartphones, wireless Internet, connected hotspots, online social networking sites, user-friendly social media platforms and photo sharing sites has normalized ubiquitous access to the Internet among mobile geographically-dispersed social groups, not least of all interactive travelers”
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