دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی برند ایالات متحده آمریکا: آزمایش ارزیابی میزان موفقیت کمپین های بازاریابی ملی - الزویر 2019

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.

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. Created in 2009, Brand USA's core mission is to increase tourism to the US to gain back market share lost after Sept. 11, 2001, and to create a self-sustaining tourism enterprise. Brand USA as an organization might be surprising given America is the most recognized nation brand in the world (Anholt & Hildreth, 2010). Its creation, though, mirrors an overall neoliberal governance shift toward branding as a core governance strategy (Eshuis & Edwards, 2012).

When not putting in proper controls and comparisons, Brand USA's efforts do work at increasing tourism on the aggregate. This big picture is what Brand USA presents in its annual marketing materials. When we get more specific and use difference-in-difference analysis with additional controls and comparisons given the natural quasi-experiment, the picture looks less rosy. Our findings indicate that perhaps the money spent on Brand USA could be better used elsewhere. The documents the organization presents do indeed show success, but when we control for time and the economic indicators that influence not only the likelihood of treatment, but also the likelihood of people traveling to the US, the results are less clear. Our analysis shows that with the controls, Brand USA is less successful at increasing tourism-related travel to America. In other words, we still need to do a lot more research to understand the measures of success for place marketing initiatives in public administration, especially at the national level.