Digital tourism journey: How social media shapes a destination brand –case study of Suzhou, China

Description

Destination branding is a well-established concept in both tourism and place-making. One of the key tools for destination branding today is social media. Undoubtedly, social media empower individual users to retell their visiting experiences and, consequently, influence other online users’ perceptions of a destination, motivation for travel, and behaviours during the visit. Conversely, social media offer destination management organisations (DMO) various avenues to understand their targeted audience’s experiences, expectations and perceptions of a destination, crowdsource and weave their opinions into the brand narrative. While existing studies have confirmed social media have transformed destination branding into a co-creation between individual users and DMO, the “digital journey” and its connection to destination branding remains relatively unexplored. The term “digital journey” is referred to the images and content shared on social media, which can be distinguished and analysed concerning three distinctive stages— before, during, and after a visit to the destination. Both online users and DMO use social media to yield their influence on destination branding, though employing different instruments or/and strategies at each stage. This paper examines how Suzhou is branded on social media through the lens of both online users and DMO in the digital journey. It analyses Suzhou’s online destination brand presented by DMO alongside user-generated content data from Twitter and interviews with key stakeholders who work on the front lines of brand marketing. With China’s far-reaching Internet censorship, Suzhou and other non-tier-one cities in China have faced a glaring disparity between domesticand inbound tourism in both services provision and economic revenue. Domestic tourism has become an over-saturated marketplace popularised by censored social media platforms. In contrast, inbound tourism has been much monopolised by major cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, partly due to the limited visibility of non-tier-one cities to the global population. On this account, destination branding and marketing on international social media has become a strategic manoeuvre for Suzhou and the like to execute. The findings from our analysis point to a strong connection with Suzhou's deliberately created destination brand as a cultural cradle with 2500 years of history. The paper concludes with the potential of digital place-branding to create alternate digital journeys for Suzhou's brand

Period	25 Jul 2022
Held at	AESOP
Degree of Recognition	International