Rescaling Destination Branding

Scale and scaling constitute a crucial dimension of tourism places that is surprisingly overlooked in the literature on destination marketing and management. Scale is a core concept of geography (e.g. Jonas, 2006) together with ‘network’, ‘territory’ and ‘place’. Marston et al. (2005, p. 420) offer a useful definition of scale as “the result of marking territories [ . . . ] through boundaries and enclosures, documents and rules, enforcing agents and their authoritative resources”. While marketing and tourism studies scholars tend to either focus on only one specific spatial level (e.g. “the city”, “the region”, “the nation” etc.), or to render a simplistic hierarchy of scalar boundaries as predetermined and fixed, several sociologists and human geographers believe that scale constitutes rather a socially constructed dimension that implies interaction among various levels of regulations (Paasi, 2004). The present study contributes to the understanding of the complexity of destination marketing and by extending seminal studies emphasizing the multi-scalar nature of place branding processes (see Giovanardi, 2015). The study takes as an appropriate empirical three Italian tourist areas that have been engaged in multi-level destination branding efforts: Turin and the Piedmont Region, Rimini and the historical region of Romagna; Urbino and the historical region of Montefeltro. Findings illustrate unexpected scaling arrangements that exceed the structuralistic and normative perspective dominating the extant literature.