Strategic Place Branding Methodologies and Theory

Question: Discuss about the Strategic Place Branding Methodologies and Theory. Answer: Introduction The report focuses on developing marketing objectives and marketing plan for the development of tourism in Shrewsbury, a quintessentially English town located on the border region of Wales and England. It can be said that Shrewsbury is one of the finest medieval towns of England. The marketing plan will focus on the 4Ps of marketing along with the budgets required for developing the marketing plan for the promotion of Shrewsbury. Marketing Objectives Marketing objectives of Shrewsbury will incorporate many goals. The objectives of the marketing plan will be described in the form of SMART objectives. Specific: The tourists demand will be highlighted in the marketing plan of promotion of tourism of the place. Apart from that, the demographic features of the target market of the tourism of Shrewsbury will also be explained in the marketing campaign or the marketing strategy. Measurable: Increase in the number of tourists for Shrewsbury up to 50 million tourists in the year of 2017. The marketing strategy must incorporate the features of the place as well as to the visitors demand within the mentioned budget (Dolnicar and Ring 2014). Attainable: The marketing plan will highlight the characteristics of the place in the promotional campaign within the budget of 100,000. It can be said that within this budget the marketing campaign will be successful in accomplishing the goals (Resnick et al. 2016). Realistic: The objectives are realistic in nature, as they will be accomplished within stipulated time and within budget. Time bound: A specific time frame of 8 months is to be determined for the successful campaigning of the marketing strategies. Apart from that, the tourism department of England will keep in track of the different aspects of the marketing strategies proposed for attracting more tourists. Marketing Plan Marketing plan for Shrewsbury include the target market, segmenting and positioning of the place not only in England but also across the world. The target market of the marketing plan includes tourists like discoverers, traditional, cosmopolitans, potterers and sightseers. Product In this context, the product is the place itself i.e. Shrewsbury. The three levels of the product in this context are divided into three groups such as core product, actual product and augmented product. In this perspective, the core product is the food drink available, shopping areas, places to visit, rich culture, medieval essence, eating outs, art, historic sites, etc. The actual product is the place itself (McCabe 2014). Augmented services are the facilities available in the tourist places for the visitors. The services offered to the tourists will bring money to the tourism sector. The unique feature of the place will be the point of differentiation from the other adjacent places present in England and Wales. The visitors will differentiate the place by its special characteristics. The target customers will definitely be attracted to the place and the features available in the place (Mii? and Podnar 2016). Price Value based pricing will be used for the service available in Shrewsbury. Apart from that, the additional features of accommodations, eat out, shopping, premium pricing can be used, as they will be selling the unique flavours of the place. It will help government in earning revenue from the place. Place To reach Shrewsbury, transportation will be available within the reach of the visitors at right time. The interval of the transportation would be of less time. The promotion of the place will not limit within England. It would attract the visitors from different parts of the world (Wearing and Schweinsberg 2016). Promotion The communication channel uses by the tourism of Shrewsbury is both traditional media and digital media. The promotional campaign will be using integrated marketing communications like advertising, direct mail, social media channels, etc. The digital media used by the tourism department are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Google Plus, etc. The traditional media of banners, print advertisements, television, and radio jingles etc (Hall 2014). The budget is mentioned below. Cost of television advertisement- 70,000 Cost of newspaper advertisement- 30,000 Average cost of a national magazine advertisement- $250,000 per ad Cost of video podcasting in YouTube - $50 per click Cost of radio advertisement- 250 to 2000 depending on the time and stations for a week. Cost of banner advertisement- 10,000 per banner for a month (Dolnicar and Ring 2014) Conclusion It can be said that earlier there are many marketing campaigns had been formulated for the promotion of tourism at Shrewsbury. However, they were not successful in terms of accomplishing their goals. In this study, the new marketing plan will definitely promote the tourism of the place that will actually contribute a lot to the economic development of the country. The major reasons of visiting the place i.e. shopping, food culture and sightseeing are highlighted in the marketing plan. References Dolnicar, S. and Ring, A., 2014. Tourism marketing research: Past, present and future.Annals of Tourism Research,47, pp.31-47. Hall, C.M., 2014.Tourism and social marketing. Routledge. McCabe, S. ed., 2014.The Routledge handbook of tourism marketing. Routledge. Mii?, K.U. and Podnar, K., 2016. Steps toward a City Marketing Mix and Its Perception Measurement.Strategic Place Branding Methodologies and Theory for Tourist Attraction, p.67. Resnick, S.M., Cheng, R., Simpson, M. and Loureno, F., 2016. Marketing in SMEs: a 4Ps self-branding model.International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior Research,22(1), pp.155-174. Wearing, S.L. and Schweinsberg, S., 2016.Marketing national parks for sustainable tourism(Vol. 72). Channel View Publications.