"Place as Product"

A Place-Based Approach to Cultural Tourism

Cultural tourism is a fast-growing and lucrative segment of the global travel industry. However, for a city or region to realise its potential for cultural tourism, its destination marketing organisation must:

• possess a holistic understanding of culture
• understand the cultural character of the destination it intends to market, and
• understand the travel motivations and behaviours of cultural tourists.

These 'three understandings' then become the basis for cultural tourism that is place-based rather than attractions-based. Capitalising on a destination's unique identity, cultural character, and 'sense of place', placed-based cultural tourism maximises a destination's appeal to cultural tourists, and maximises a destination's profit from cultural tourism.

Whither Cultural Tourism?

For the past decade, the growth of cultural tourism has challenged cities and regions to capitalise on their cultural tourism assets. Next to visiting friends and relatives, culture is arguably the world's leading travel motivator within the leisure travel market. This presents cities and regions with an unparalleled opportunity. However, destination marketing organisations (DMOs) responsible for cultural tourism marketing often do not understand culture - the very product they are attempting to sell. The result? Most DMOs engage in attractions-based cultural tourism that promotes the destination's cultural icons: its first-tier museums, galleries, festivals, and heritage sites.

Like a renaissance tapestry whose mid-ground and background elements have been stripped away - depriving the foreground of its context - attractions-based cultural tourism focuses on 'foreground' cultural icons while overlooking the destination's most precious asset: its unique identity, its cultural character, its 'sense of place'. Sense of place is the characteristic that most distinguishes one destination from another. It is the ingredient that makes a destination distinctive, authentic, and memorable. It is what cultural tourists most value.

Before outlining a place-based approach to cultural tourism, let us review the attractions-based approaches to cultural tourism as practiced by most cities and regions (Table 1, below).

Most commonly, a destination's cultural icons - its first-tier museums, galleries, festivals, and heritage sites - are positioned within the destination's leisure travel campaign. Sometimes, a marquee attraction, usually a blockbuster exhibition or a theatrical production, will be paired with accommodation and marketed as a cultural getaway package. Occasionally, in major cities, a stand-alone cultural campaign will market the city's first and second-tier cultural attractions in an effort to position the city as a cultural destination. Finally, a city or region will sometimes aggregate a single type of cultural attraction (e.g., artist studios, heritage attractions, live music venues) to form an artists' route, a heritage trail, or a 'music crawl'.

Each of these attractions-based approaches will lure cultural tourists. Each will return dividends. However, each is also supplier-driven, conceived from the vantage point of suppliers (i.e., the cultural attractions) that the destination is seeking to sell.

This is the Achilles' heel of attractions-based cultural tourism: the effort begins with suppliers, not customers.

Table 1: Attractions-based Approaches to Cultural Tourism

Orient to the Customer

As distinct from the approaches cited above, place-based cultural tourism is customer-oriented. It is conceived from the vantage point of the cultural tourists that a destination seeks to attract. Such an approach mirrors the manner in which most goods and services are brought to market: consumer behaviour drives product development, which then drives manufacturing and retail. Place-based cultural tourism:

• employs a holistic process for destination planning that is specific to cultural tourism, and
• markets the destination's cultural experiences in a manner that targets the motivations and behaviours of cultural tourists.

By embracing a customer-oriented, place-based approach, a destination can achieve the ideal outcomes of any tourism initiative: to maximise the destination's appeal, to maximise visitor length of stay, and to maximise visitor spending.

Inventory the Experiences

In place-based cultural tourism, the first step is to inventory, assess, and categorise all the cultural tourism experiences in a given city or region.

The inventory is holistic and comprehensive. Five cultural clusters form the basis of the inventory: human heritage, the arts, industrial and agricultural heritage, natural history, and cuisine. In turn, these five cultural clusters are sub-divided into discrete categories of cultural experience that capture the full range of cultural expression of a place and its people.

Of the five cultural clusters, natural history is perhaps the most unexpected. It shouldn't be. The land shapes its people, and people shape their land. Culture cannot be understood or appreciated without interpreting the land, even in an urban environment.

In a large city or region, the inventory may capture more than 150 cultural experiences, extending well beyond the iconic museums, galleries, festivals, and heritage sites that predominate in attractions-based approaches. A smaller city or town will have fewer cultural experiences, although the number will be surprising nonetheless. Moreover, as each cultural experience is assigned to its appropriate cluster and category, the destination's cultural typology begins to be revealed (Chart 1, below).

Chart 1: A Destination's Cultural Typology

The Cultural Typology

Every destination has its own cultural typology, shaped by the city or region's social and cultural development and by the type, quantity, and quality of its cultural experiences. Less tangible cultural experiences such as language, traditions, and folklore are also key components of a destination's cultural typology.

Put on paper using narrative and graphic elements, a cultural typology reveals the destination's unique identity, cultural character, and sense of place - its 'terroir' - in all its breadth, depth, and dimension.¹ At the same time, it identifies the destination's strengths and limitations for cultural tourism. In cultural tourism, place is product. The cultural typology defines the place and conceptualises the product. It is the cornerstone of place-based cultural tourism.

Weave a Tapestry of Place

Once a destination's cultural typology is in place, a product positioning matrix (PPM) determines how best to position the destination's cultural experiences in relation to each other. The PPM is divided into three categories: lead, supporting, and sustaining experiences. These three categories correspond to the foreground, mid-ground, and background of the renaissance tapestry discussed above. Depending on which PPM category each cultural experience is assigned to, each will have greater or lesser prominence when the destination is taken to market.

Taken as a whole, a place-based cultural tourism product might best be described as a tapestry of place. Among other elements, the tapestry is composed of the destination's people, its history, its language, its folklore, its cuisine, its natural and built heritage, its art and music, its customs and traditions - along with its cultural icons and the other 'usual' cultural experiences that a visitor might expect. Just as a renaissance tapestry tells a unique story, a tapestry of place reveals a unique destination - one that is like no other.

Design Themed Routes

Guided by the cultural typology and the product positioning matrix, themed routes will emerge to link the destination's cultural experiences - each route a thread that helps to reveal the larger tapestry of place. Of course, different cultural tourists have different areas of cultural interest - different threads they will want to explore.

Market the Place as the Product

When taken to market, a place-based cultural tourism product invites the visitor to experience much more than the destination's cultural 'attractions'. The attractions are there, but they become expressions of the destination's culture rather than its embodiment. The branding, imaging and messaging developed for the marketing campaign communicates the destination's sense of place as much as profiling the attractions.

Research shows that cultural tourists rely extensively on the internet to plan their travel.³ Accordingly, a destination website/portal, featuring a place-based aesthetic combined with high functionality, will pay significant dividends. Fully realised, it should enable the visitor to 'sense the place', explore the destination and its themed routes, search for cultural experiences by type and by timeframe of the visit, build custom itineraries, and book accommodation.

Conclusion

Cultural tourists are savvy, sophisticated travellers who seek learning and enrichment. In the ever-more competitive world of tourism, destinations that embrace holistic, customer-oriented, place-based cultural tourism will eclipse other destinations that cling to conventional, supplier-driven, attractions-based approaches.

At the same time, evidence is mounting that place-based cultural tourism encourages cities and regions to know and value their culture more fully, ensuring its preservation and stewardship for the benefit of citizens and tourists alike. To this end, the principles and practice of cultural planning can facilitate community engagement with, and contributions toward, place-based cultural tourism.⁴

In sum, through place-based cultural tourism, cities and regions can reap tourism dividends and sustain the sense of place that makes each destination one to treasure.

References

¹ A term borrowed from French viticulture, 'terroir' can be loosely translated as 'the essence of the earth'. It denotes the unique cultural character of a place and its people.

² Research by the Canadian Tourism Commission identifies these cohorts as composing the larger population of cultural tourists in Canada and the U.S. (Travel Activities and Motivation Survey, Segmentation Reports, 2000 - 2003). It is presumed these same cohorts exist within any population of cultural tourists.

³ According to the 2003 edition of The Historic/Cultural Traveler (Travel Industry Association of America), 58 percent of frequent cultural travellers in the U.S. report using the Internet for travel planning. This figure has undoubtedly risen substantially during the past six years.

⁴ With roots in Australia, Europe, and the U.K., cultural planning is a holistic approach to the development of creative cities. Proponents of place-based tourism such as Dan Shilling (Civic Tourism, The Poetry and Politics of Place, 2007, Prescott, Arizona: Sharlot Hall Museum Press) espouse precepts of cultural planning and community engagement in the service of destination development and management.

© Copyright 2009 Steven Thorne. All rights reserved.

TEAM Associate Steven Thorne is a leading Canadian specialist in the field of cultural tourism. He specialises in planning, developing, and marketing place-based cultural tourism destinations that reveal the cultural character, sense of place, and 'terroir' of a city or region. Known for pioneering strategies and processes that enable destinations to realise their potential for cultural tourism, Steven has directed cultural tourism initiatives for three Canadian provinces. With an extensive background in arts and culture, he brings a unique sensibility and skill set to the challenges of cultural tourism. Steven can be contacted via e-mail.