Place Branding—The Challenges of Getting It Right: Coping with Success and Rebuilding from Crises

Abstract

A focus on continued year-on-year economic growth was beginning to be seen as unsustainable even before the COVID-19 crisis forced many tourism destinations to rethink their marketing and branding. This paper adopts a critical marketing stance to explore the relationship between place branding and two recent extreme conditions affecting the tourism industry: overtourism, as exemplified when the issue became headline news in popular media from the summer of 2017, as many examples were offered of places struggling to cope with their success; and the COVID-19 crisis that effectively brought global tourism to a standstill in 2020, as the industry attempts to rebuild from this current unprecedented crisis. This article is not designed to suggest normative place-branding strategies. Rather, through the presentation of an original model that conceptualizes the cyclical process of rebuilding from crises and coping with success, it aims to provide a warning that whatever place-branding strategies are implemented in a post-pandemic world, for whatever type of tourism, in whatever type of destination, a rein must be employed in order that the drive for recovery from undertourism through successful place branding does not lead to the return of overtourism.