Abstract
As national, state, and local governments implement strategic place branding and marketing plans, questions remain about how to best measure the success of such endeavors. Using a natural quasi-experimental design, we evaluate how well marketing efforts from Brand USA achieve intended tourism goals. Brand USA was created in 2009 to market the country abroad. Based on air travel data collected from the National Travel and Tourism Office, Brand USA reports, and economic indicators from the World Bank, we find Brand USA's marketing efforts have little effect on inbound international travel to the US, thus showing a potential weakness in place marketing efforts abroad. Findings suggest the organization may decrease the effectiveness of the complex branding campaign.
1. Introduction
Popular news outlets have covered President Trump and his effect on travel to the United States. Recently, news of the US Supreme Court upholding Trump's travel ban caused a spokesperson for Brand USA, the government's destination marketing agency, to reaffirm the role of destination marketing and implore people to transcend political rhetoric and visit the US (Leposa, 2018). What some are calling the “Trump slump” has cost the US travel and tourism industry an estimated $4.6 billion and 40,000 jobs (US Travel Association, 2018). Perhaps signaling Brand USA as extraneous government spending, the Trump administration threatened to revoke funding for the agency in its fiscal year 2018 budget request (Gingerish, 2018). Together these events beg the question: How well do Brand USA's destination branding and marketing efforts work?
5. Conclusion and discussion
Brand America is struggling on an international level thanks to America's turbulent political climate. Political turmoil is one of the important risk factors international visitors assess when making travel decisions, so studying its effects are important (Krozak et al., 2007). As Brand USA continues spending money on international branding and marketing efforts, we need to better understand the effects given the use of taxpayer dollars for these purposes. In this paper, we set out to narrow the brand evaluation gap by examining the efforts of Brand USA, giving us a natural quasi-experiment of countries receiving marketing promotion versus those that did not.
