Abstract

In the early 2000’s, tourism in Cape Town was going through a bad phase. Safety and security of tourists, the setting in of recession, political instability, and inadequate infrastructure were some of the problems the city had to deal with. Till 2004, the local tourism organizations in Cape Town were doing their best but were not able to attract tourists. They therefore decided to merge and form a unified body ‘Cape Town Tourism’ in 2004. Cape Town Tourism began work for the development of tourism in Cape Town under the theme ‘Responsible Tourism’. Cape Town witnessed a gradual increase in the inflow of foreign tourists till 2007. But the following two years were not favorable. With Cape Town getting the chance to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup, however, the city tried to make every use of the opportunity. The result was the ever highest tourist inflow in 2010. Soon, as the tourism authorities had anticipated, Cape Town began to see a decline in the number of overseas visitors due to the ‘post event dip’ and global recession. Cape Town Tourism was, however, ready for that phase and it partnered with Ogilvy & Mather to launch a global marketing campaign designed to reposition the destination brand. The campaign relied heavily on digital marketing, which included a highly visible Facebook campaign. While Cape Town and its advertising agency earned accolades for the digital marketing campaign, they still faced certain challenges in using digital marketing for tourism development.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Understand the issues and challenges in tourism development and destination marketing
• Understand how to tackle changes in the tourism demand pattern
• Appreciate and analyze crowdsourcing for branding using social media channels.
• Analyze Cape Town Tourism’s digital marketing strategy
• Explore ways in which Cape Town Tourism could market the Cape Town brand in the future.

Keywords

Tourism development,Tourism marketing, Destination Marketing, Services marketing, Tourism demand determinants, ‘Post event dip’, Responsible tourism, Global marketing campaign, Repositioning, Plog’s Psychographic Classification of Tourists and Travel Motivation, Digital marketing, SOSTAC Digital Marketing Planning Model, Facebook campaign, Crowdsourcing, Content marketing