Abstract
The paralysis of tourist activity during the closure caused by the COVID-19 pandemic makes the communicative management of the crisis essential, especially for a country as reliant on tourism as Spain. The purpose of this research is to understand the values on which the communicative campaigns disseminated during and at the end of the “state of alarm” are built by applying an analysis based on those proposed by several authors focused on brand aspects, transmitters, persuasive and communicative elements, coherence, communicative objectives, and messages. The results show the existence of a national dialogue from the local and regional to the state level that aims to reinforce the image of the country and its main tourist demands while seeking to raise awareness (promise of consumption), through a message of hope, recovery, health, but also of enjoying the life associated with the tourist pleasures that Spain offers.
Highlights
Tourism advertising has collected, for decades, the social, political, and economic reality of tourist destinations and allows, insofar as it is part of persuasive communication (Marín et al 2021; Sanz-Marcos 2020), to build a brand image (a “country brand” or a “city brand” or “citybranding”) for these destinations with the ulterior objective of introducing that tourist image in the mind of the tourist, as a potential and real consumer, achieving the visit and the desired behavior, and that it is repeated (He and Luo 2020; Dávila-Lorenzo and Saladrigas-Medina 2020; Hernández 2019)
On 11 March, by the World Health Organization of the global pandemic caused by COVID-19, the main barrier that tourism advertising had to overcome was the difficulty to differentiate itself in a crowded market, trying to maintain a difficult balance between the homogenization of the offer and its diversification and specialization (Arana et al 2020), considering the susceptibility of the sector to any event, of any kind (Xin et al 2019)
Our analysis is included in the studies on the management of institutional advertising, public interest advertising, in our case, tourism, of a qualitative nature due to its textual and content component. (Bardin 2002; Piñuel 2002), stopping in the discursive elements contributed from the communicative, advertising, and marketing spheres applied to tourism or the tourist brand image
Summary
For decades, the social, political, and economic reality of tourist destinations and allows, insofar as it is part of persuasive communication (Marín et al 2021; Sanz-Marcos 2020), to build a brand image (a “country brand” or a “city brand” or “citybranding”) for these destinations with the ulterior objective of introducing that tourist image in the mind of the tourist, as a potential and real consumer, achieving the visit and the desired behavior, and that it is repeated (He and Luo 2020; Dávila-Lorenzo and Saladrigas-Medina 2020; Hernández 2019). Today, when in many countries, such as Spain for example, sanitary security measures are still in place to prevent outbreaks of the disease, the main obstacle to tourism, generally as an activity, is none other than reactivating an essential sector for many economies, whose impact is being greater than happened in the Chinese economy with the SARS epidemic in 2003 (Dombey 2004). This is not so from a social perspective. The impact of the pandemic on the tourism sector has been noted worldwide; The UNWTO itself announced, in May 2020, a global fall of the sector of 22%, an impact that, at the Spanish level, will be drastic with regard to foreign tourism, a section that will subtract more growth from national GDP1, whose recovery forecast does not place similar numbers prior to the pandemic until at least one year ahead
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
