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Agenda

Culture, Heritage and Dark Tourism – A Marketing Perspective . Agenda. Introduce the concept of ‘cultural commodification’. Highlight nature of heritage interpretation, authenticity & impacts upon marketing. Discuss dark tourism as ‘heritage that hurts’ & its ethical marketing dimensions. .

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Agenda

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  1. Culture, Heritage and Dark Tourism – A Marketing Perspective Agenda • Introduce the concept of ‘cultural commodification’. • Highlight nature of heritage interpretation, authenticity & impacts upon marketing. • Discuss dark tourism as ‘heritage that hurts’ & its ethical marketing dimensions.

  2. Culture & Commodification • Culture and tourism is manifested by the ‘heritage industry’…. “…tourism and culture now plainly overlap… tourism as a cultural practice and set of objects is highly significant or emblematic within contemporary ‘Western’ societies organised around mass mobility.” Rojeck & Urry (1997) • BUT… notion of ‘commodification’ is apparent through standard presentational & commercial techniques.

  3. Culture & Commodification • Commodifying cultural products is seen as optimum way of selling heritage. “…convergency on the demand side and standardisation of products on the supply side [perhaps] explains why the option of diversification and divergency in heritage product development, with an emphasis on uniqueness and cultural identity of resources, places and people, is regarded as the more risky option.” Adapted from Laws (2001) • Highlights notion of interpretation…

  4. Heritage Interpretation & the Consumer Experience • Individuals may negotiate meanings & approach heritage on their own terms. • Heritage consumption is derived from the form, content, narrative & nature of how the past is ‘interpreted’. “Consumerism of culture, and our ability to selectively promote and market a commoditized heritage product raises issues of product authenticity.” Stone (2005)

  5. Interpretation, Representation & Product Authenticity “All too often the past is idealised and packaged, not to invite challenge, but to merely to act as a backdrop for the leisure events that attract the paying public.” West (1990) • Promoting and marketing cultural products as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ may alter historical discourse… “The more we consume of what is ‘not real’… the more we may believe it is ‘real’… Stone (2005)

  6. Heritage that Hurts - Concept of Dark Tourism - • Interest in death, disaster & atrocity is a growing phenomenon. “Dark tourism is the temporary visitation of people to formal or informal visitor attractions, sites or exhibitions which offer presentation and interpretation of death and associated suffering as their raison d'être.” Stone (2003) • ‘Fatal attraction’ sites have become commercialised… and commoditized…

  7. Heritage that Hurts - Concept of Dark Tourism - “ ‘Dark tourism’ signifies a fundamental shift in the way in which death, disaster and atrocity are being handled by those who offer associated tourism ‘products’ ”. Lennon & Foley (2000) • Through presentation, whether real or fictional, death has become a commodity for consumption.

  8. Marketing Dark Tourism • Managers need to understand the nature of the dark tourism product... “If dark tourism is marketed and promoted in a similar vain as ‘traditional heritage’, then we are in danger of misrepresenting the darker elements of history, which in turn may have profound implications for society at large.” Stone (2005)

  9. Marketing Dark Tourism & Cultural Heritage • We need to appreciate the impact of ‘romanticism’ within the heritage product. • Marketing more sensitively may be a solution…. “The concept of ‘societal marketing’ may hold some of the answers when it comes to marketing cultural products more ethically by emphasising meaning and fulfilment rather than emphasising facilities and services.” Stone (2005)

  10. Seminar Session There will be directed reading this week. Have a good Easter break….

  11. Directed Reading Drummond S & Yeoman I (2001) ‘Quality Issues In Heritage Visitor Attractions’, BH, (Chapter 6) Lennon J & Foley M (2000) ‘Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster’, Continuum. Consider these questions when you are reading: How does the sentimentalising of the heritage product through imagery occur, why does it occur, and does it really matter? For ‘dark products’, what are the impacts of ‘sanitizing’ death likely to be, and what would be your appropriate managerial response?

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