DESTINATION BRANDING- A CURRENT SOCIAL MEDIA APPROACH

Abstract

Destinations are marketed in various ways, the best medium being Destination Branding. As it is today, a lot of cities and states have formed internationally renowned brand names through various innovative campaigns and the help of Brand Ambassadors, creative taglines, vibrant ads & billboard displays and an effective far-reaching social media campaign. The best example can be that of the 23 Mediterranean Countries that used Facebook for an effective Destination Branding. Social media is considered as one of the most important forms of communication in this modern era of technology, the use of Facebook and the micro-blogging website, Twitter has seen a staggering rise. This conceptual research focuses on the process of Destination Branding using two key pillars of Social Media, which is very new, quite effective in terms of reach and the best of all, free! The two media are Instagram and Snapchat. Using the Case Study approach, cities like Lyon, Amsterdam, and Philadelphia have been studied their campaigns have been immensely successful, as revealed by the numbers of people reached by the Instagram campaigns. The research also consists of suggestions and tactics that Destination Marketers and Branders can use as campaigns on Snapchat, to make effective use of opportunities in Real-Time Marketing. The objective being to bring out the fact that today, a Brand does not really need a famous person as an Ambassador and that Hashtags are the new-age way of search engines and how these strategies can be used by small cities in India. The research also focuses on giving suggestions about how Goa and Bangalore can use hashtags on Instagram and Snapchat effectively to promote the brands that they stand for.