4. Concluding remarks
In this concluding paragraph we highlight what do the aforementioned
issues and trends identified mean for policymakers,
academics and future research.
First it seems that policymakers (at any level of government)
should pay more attention to and financially support in depth
research involving strategic analyses and forecasts carried out on
the basis of reliable primary data subsequently elaborated through
sound statistical tools and techniques: this could help not only
identifying the most profitable outbound markets and segments
but also to craft the most suitable operational marketing tools to
selectively target the most interesting segments. In other words
strategic analyses should always come before any operational action;
additionally operational destination marketing based just on secondary
data and/or on data collected with opaque research protocols
often can lead to biased marketing tactics for the destination itself.
Secondly, it appears that academics should be more involved in
developing new techniques able to describe how target markets
evolve over time and push their academic interest on innovative
tools in the field of destination branding. Accordingly, techniques
such as the separation of the naïve from the reevaluated tourism
destination image deserve more attention in light of the crucial
role they could play for destination marketers.
Last but not least future research might be directed towards the
understanding of how different coopetitive arrangements both
within destinations and between destinations could affect the way
destination can leverage their marketing strategies over time in
order to gain a sustainable coopetitive advantage