Abstract
In the ever more competitive tourism marketplace, destinations — from resorts to countries — are increasingly adopting branding techniques in an effort to craft and differentiate an identity which emphasises the uniqueness of their product. This paper briefly discusses the role of branding in destination marketing and evaluates whether destinations can indeed be branded as other goods and services. It suggests that destinations seeking to brand themselves face three unique constraints — a lack of control over the total marketing mix, their relatively limited budgets, and often, over-arching political considerations. In such circumstances, some destinations are adopting strategies whose main goal could be described as the creation of brand saliency — the development of an emotional relationship with the consumer through highly choreographed and focused communications campaigns. To explore this strategy — which we term 'spiritual marketing' — the paper discusses a case study, evaluating how one destination is currently trying to brand itself, particularly in its prime overseas market of the USA. The paper concludes by arguing that such a targeted, multi-agency 'mood marketing' initiative is an effective and efficient way to overcome some of the problems facing destination marketers.