1. Singapore as a country and its tourism: the overview
1.1 Singapore country profile
Republic of Singapore is a Southeast Asian city-state located on 63 islands. It is separated from Malaysia and Indonesia by the straits of Johor and Singapore Strait respectively. The population of the country amounts to approximately 5.3 million and is constantly growing, and with total area of just 710 km2 Singapore is in the world top-3 by the density of population with 7,315 people per square kilometer, which implies that there is a need for land creation, which is being done through land reclamation.
Even though the first mention of the territory of modern Singapore is dated back to 3rd century B.C., the history of the city-state effectively began in 1819, when Singapore was established as a trading port of East India Company. Five years later, the British Empire took over the territory making it a British Strait Settlement in 1826. Counting merely 1,000 people in 1819, the population of Singapore increased 140 times in the following 70 years; the last quarter of 19th century also saw dramatic increase in trading volumes and economic development.
Untouched by the World War I, Singapore was occupied by Japan during the second global affair, having been left virtually without defense. As Japan capitulated, the United Kingdom regained control over Singapore, which was not well received by the citizens who wanted sovereignty. After almost two decades of conflicts, Singapore united with Malaysia to create independent from the UK Malaysia Federation, which lasted for only two years: in 1965 Singapore separated from its neighbor and become a sovereign state – a member of Commonwealth of Nations and United Nations.
Surviving initially thanks to servicing British military based situated on island, Singapore quickly found the way to economic prosperity on its own, becoming one of the biggest financial center, while its port is in top-5 busiest ones in the world. As for 2012, Singapore has third-leading GDP per capita (Purchasing Power Parity) trailing only to Qatar and Luxembourg (IMF, 2012).
1.2 Tourism in Singapore
With over 13 millions tourists having visited Singapore in 2011 – 13% increase from 2010 (Singapore Tourism Board), the tourism sector contributed with SGD 22,3 billion – 18% increase from 2010, meaning that not only did the number of visitors increase, but also each of them has spent more on average. Overall, tourism receipts contributed 5% percent to the national output in 2011, which emphasized the importance of the sector.
The vast majority of tourists come from Asia-Pacific region, with Indonesia, China and Malaysia being the key contributors with over 5 million visitors shared between them. Australia, India, Philippines and Japan follow with annual number of tourist being in 500,000-1,000,000 range in 2010, while the most contributing countries from outside the region – the United States and the United Kingdom are placed 10th and 11th respectively with almost 900,000 tourists combined. The most significant source of tourists to Singapore in continental Europe is Germany with almost 220,000 visitors in 2010.
Source: Singapore Tourism Board
It is hard to call the growth in past 15 years steady, in fact, four consecutive years of growth between 2004 and 2007 is the record for the period. Both unstable periods (1997-2003 and 2008-2009) are explained by crises – the former by 1997 Asian financial crisis, the latter – by 2008 global crisis. Unsurprisingly, the impact of 1997 downturn had been far more severe – it took six years for the affected economies (each of them major contributor to Singaporean tourism) to recover, while the recent crisis slowed down the growth for two years only to grow by 35% in the following to years with no reason why the growth should not continue.
Or is the picture that rosy? While expressing pride of outstanding performance in 2010 and 2011, the latest 2011/12 annual report by Singapore Tourism Board expressed concerns about the future of the tourism in the city emphasizing four major threats it was facing: i) exponential tourism growth; ii) the small size of country; iii) infrastructure constraints and iv) limited manpower resources. Indeed, with area of merely 710 km2 and already incredibly high density of population, it is possible that Singapore just does not possess enough physical capacity to handle rapidly growing market and to maintain, let alone increase, the market share.
The infrastructure struggles, however, are not the key point of this work as it concentrates on tourism marketing and destination branding in particular. While this chapter gave the overview of Singapore as a country and its tourism sector, the following chapters will directly relate to the issue of destination branding.
2. Destination branding: the theory
The common definition of the term ‘brand’ is the following: “a class of goods identified by name as the product of single firm or manufacturer” (“The Penguin Concise English Dictionary” 98). In marketing, the importance of this term goes well beyond simply relating a product or service to its manufacturer – brand defines how customers perceive a product. Wood states that brads are crucial for differentiation of the products meaning and be key for the company’s success, which is the reason why they need to be strategically managed (662). Correspondingly, branding is the process of differentiating the product through creating name, design or symbol – something that distinguishes it from others without changing the core.
Tourism destinations, however, are by no means the typical products or services. While the main task of branding is to create favorable image in customers’ minds, the image of cities and countries often have been formulated during centuries or even millennia. Morgan, Pritchard and Pride argue that while typical products like a soap powder can be branded and rebranded, it would be false to approach destinations in the same way – in this case branding process should adapt to existing identity of a place, gradually managing conceptions and misconceptions (60). And while destination branding is destined to face challenges not all of which can be controlled by managers, it is still believed to be a powerful marketing weapon.
In fact, when it comes destinations, the marketers do not have full power in creating a destination image – they are very much limited by what the place really is, and the art here consists in communicating it to potential visitors in a way that would attract them. Gunn offered two kinds of results of the complex destination image creation process: termed organic and induced image (qtd in Henderson 262). Termed organic is formed over time and is communicated through media, popular culture and education, while the latter is the product of promotion and advertisements. Induced image can be further divided into two groups with one representing traditional marketing activities and the other consisting in deliberate attempts to alter destination image.
So, what can managers do? According to Blain, Levy and Ritchie, they can undertake set of activities that i) support creation of a logo, name, symbol or any graphical representation or a slogan that would provide a positive differentiation for a place; ii) to communicate anticipations of experience the potential visitors may associate with destination; iii) to enhance emotional bonds between the tourists and place; iv) to raise awareness about destination and to diminish perceived risk.
As it was mentioned, there are certain challenges that need to be address when creating destination image. First of all, it should correspond to reality. The tourism market is far from one where hit-and-run strategy is applicable – people come back, share their experiences, with both acquaintances via private conversations and strangers via review websites like TripAdvisor, influencing the perception of others making the advertisements meaningless. The second limitation of destination branding, especially when it comes to the whole country, is that it should appeal to different groups of tourists, making it to general and ignoring important cultural traits (which, in turn, may annoy the citizens), while making it more specific may lead to ignoring significant market segments. Another problems is that some of misconceptions, or rather stereotypes are hard to reverse, at least in the short run – it is related to Gunn’s termed organic; besides, branding activities that aim to influence perception may provoke customers’ dissonance in perception of destination. Finally, the effects of destination branding are awfully hard to measure. In nowadays’ dynamically changing environment performance of a destination depends on myriad of variables, which are very hard to isolate in order to obtain empirical evidence of whether a particular branding strategy was a success or not and which aspects of strategy have the biggest influence.
3. Singapore destination branding strategies
3.1 “Uniquely Singapore”
Uniquely Singapore brand was launched in March 2004, to provide a boost to Singaporean tourism after the economies in Asia Pacific region had recovered from 1997 crisis. It has coincided with the above-mentioned period of four consecutive years of growth in number of tourists, but here measurability problem that was discussed in the previous section is very demonstrative: how much the number of visitors grew because of recovery from crisis and how much (if at all) because of the new branding strategy? It is close to impossible to answer this question.
The following table presents the profile of “Uniquely Singapore” branding, as presented by the Singapore Tourism Board (qtd in Henderson 267-268)
Source: Henderson 267-268
Eventually, it was the decided that the world ‘unique’ is the best suit to all the mentioned above. The concept was aimed at tourist whose purpose for coming is business, education or medical care, rather than on leisure tourists. Visual representation of the brand consists in series of bright pictures and “Uniquely Singapore” signature translated to different languages of key Asian markets for Singapore tourism. Four key areas are then separated: uniquely attractive Sightseeing, uniquely desirable Shopping, uniquely delicious Food, uniquely relaxing Cruise, uniquely captivating Events and uniquely Successful Business Travel, Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (Henderson 268).
Branding is meaningless without decent exposure of a brand. Soon after official domestic launch of the campaign in 2004, the brand was introduced internationally at trade fair in Germany, which was a beginning of an aggressive international advertisement campaign, which included all sorts of promotion from print and online advertising to allocation of tourism ambassadors in the key markets and presenting the new brand to key partners – tourism operators and travel agencies – who incorporated it into their offers and own advertisement.
3.2 “YourSingapore”
“Uniquely Singapore” brand existed for five years between 2004 and 2009 and was succeeded by, or as Singapore Tourism Board puts it, evolved in “YourSingapore” brand, launched in March 2010. Interestingly, like “Uniquely Singapore”, “YourSingapore” was introduced after the period of slowdown related to crisis, when a recovery was pretty much expected, from which we may conclude that establishing new branding strategy are the tool of supporting recovery when the low moments – to give a breath of fresh air to Singapore Tourism.
As it was mentioned before, destination is not a tooth powder, which can be branded and rebranded virtually without limitations: even though Singapore is a young country with no thousands of years of heritage, its image is very hard to change significantly – it can be polished, decorated, but not altered. Obviously, even in today’s dramatically changing environment it is unlikely that strengths and brand attributes have changed between 2004 and 2009, so the task of a new brand was not to alter destination image but to find something that communicated it better. The word “Your” was summoned to perform the task, and it must be said that this decision is somewhat braver: while “Unique” just communicates the characteristic (if it can be called so) of Singapore, “Your” is an attempt to establish emotional connection between potential tourists and the destination. Apparently, the cultural diversity and friendliness are being communicated by this word, suggesting that any visitor would feel welcomed in Singapore feeling that the place ‘belongs’ to him or her as much as to every other person in there.
The general logo represents eight cubes lying on each other creating a shape, which resembles the shape of the island. Additionally, there are logos related to particular kinds of attractions (food, heritage, business etc.) each of them being a set of objects organized in the shape also resembling the island.
The new strategy was not limited to change of the name and the logo. Which is more important, it has been designed to address new trends in the industry: i) popularity of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) experiences when the tourists organize their program on themselves rather then buy ready packages, ii) increased importance of the Internet as the communication channels (“YourSingapore Brand Story” 2). In this context “Your” means something more than just expression of hospitality of the place – it also communicates the idea of personalization of the trips. The research conducted by Google showed that three quarters of tourists in key target markets for Singaporean tourism rely on Internet (qtd in “YourSingapore Brand Story” 3), to which Singapore Tourism Board with making emphasis on the company’s website “yoursingapore.com”, which includes full information on the events, offers virtual tours and allows to design the trip – here the word “Your” is also far from meaningless hinting on self-dependence of the tourists.
4. Comparison of the strategies: discussion and conclusion
The first thing I would like to pay attention at is timing. In both cases the branding strategies have been launched just after periods of slowdown related to two major crises, when the recovery was expected – in both cases the growth followed, and one may assume that at least partly it was driven by the effects of the new strategies, although the exact impact is very hard to measure. It also can be argues, that one of the purposes of creating the strategies was to manifest changes in order to go in line with the global economic situation.
There is also something fundamentally different between “Uniquely Singapore” and “YourSingapore” strategies: while the former was an example of employing new approach, the latter strategy was rather a polishing, adaption of the old strategy to the new changing environment. There was no rebranding – Singapore Tourism Board consistently uses the word “evolution” of one brand into another to describe what happened in 2010, and I believe that this term is perfectly legitimate. In my opinion, it is hard to call the “Uniquely Singapore” strategy very sophisticated. I agree with Henderson (271) that the word “Unique” in context of destination is quite meaningless as, to some extent, every place in the world is unique, especially tourism destination. On the other hand, it is a safe bet, as it cannot provoke any dissonance in consumers’ minds related to ingrained conceptions about the place. The “Uniquely Singapore” strategy must have been successful due to amounts of advertisement – it most certainly had raised awareness of Singapore as a destination, but it is unlikely that it clearly established significant emotional connection between tourists and brand.
On the other hand, “YourSingapore” strategy was launched in another critical moment for the industry when it was believed that the old strategy could no longer play the role of ‘recovery catalyst’. Besides, a change as itself was absolutely necessary to proclaim preparedness to go from the period of stagnation to the period of growth – for both Singapore tourism and region as a whole. The new marketing strategy was also required to address changes in the industry unrelated to global economic prosperity. While “Uniquely Singapore” brand was designed pretty much because something should have been designed, “YourSingapore” appears to me as more sophisticated, profound and tailored to address particular issues. It dares to establish emotional connection between tourists and the brand, it also responds to newly emerged need of tourists’ self-independence. Not only does it communicate the identity of the destination, but it also responds to external challenges, making “Your” a much more meaningful and polysemantic word than it may seem on the first glance.
It is also interesting, that Singapore brands itself as a brand, meaning that they openly refer to the destination as a brand on their website. While any place can be called a brand, not every place would do a wise thing by openly proclaiming that it actually is, as it may kill the soul of the place. Apparently, soul of Singapore includes being a brand and the place targets people who are perfectly comfortable with that – modern, rational, realistic, business people.
The problem is that it is still unknown how much it matters. As it was described in the theoretical part, not only is the destination image defined by marketing activities, but also by numerous factors that are well out of control of the most insightful marketing experts.
Works cited:
Allen, Robert. Concise English Dictionary. London: The Penguin. 2001. Print.
Blain, Carmen; Levy, Stuart, and Ritchie, Brent. “Destination Branding: Insights and Practices from Destination Management Organizations”. Journal of Travel Research. 2005: 43. Web.
Creative Roots. Explore the world: YourSingapore logo. Web. Aug 21, 2013.
Dahlen, Michael; Lange, Fredrik, and Smith, Terry. Marketing Communications: A Brand Narrative Approach. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. 2010. Web.
Henderson, Joan C. “Uniquely Singapore? A case study in destination branding”. Journal of Vacation Marketing. 2006: 13-3. Print.
International Monetary Fund. World Economic Outlook Database. Web. Aug 20, 2013.
Morgan, Nigel; Pritchard, Annette, and Pride, Roger. Destination Branding. Managing Place Reputaton. Oxford: Elsevier. 2002.
Singapore Tourism Board. Annual Report 2011/2012. Web. Aug 20, 2013.
Singapore Tourism Boars. Tourism Statistics Publications. Web. Aug 20, 2013.
Wood, Lisa. “Brands and brand equity: definition and management”. Management Decision. 2000: 38-9. Web. Aug 20, 2013.
YourSingapore. Plan Your Trip. Web. Aug 20, 2013.
YourSingapore. YourSingapore brand story. Web. Aug 20, 2013.
