Mid Sweden University

The project aims to explore the link between destination branding, tourism experiences, and the green transition of the tourism sector. It focuses on four key areas: a) investigating how visitors experience the sustainability of destination offerings; b) understanding how this experience impacts the perceived value of destination experience; c) examining how destination branding can encourage sustainable tourism behavior, thereby enhancing brand value and aiding the industry's green transition; d) exploring how tourism companies can leverage insights into drivers of tourist experience value to facilitate this transition. The project currently conducted in collaboration with Höga Kusten destination in Sweden seeks to extend the conceptual understanding of customer-based destination brand equity (CBDBE) by integrating the perceptions of sustainability value of destination brands. The background of the project concerns the challenges, which the tourism industry face in matching its green transition in relation to tourists' increasing and changing demand for sustainable destination experiences, tourists' acceptance of personal responsibility, actual behavior and perceived value of a sustainable tourism stay. To meet these challenges, companies and other destination actors need to understand the tourists' sustainable behavior, follow its changes and use the knowledge for building an attractive brand. In the current stage of the project, by utilizing brand and customer value theories, we design a web-based experiment to examine how perceptions of destination sustainability influence guest experiences. The projects’ main theoretical contribution relates to the extension of the CBDBE model by integrating the dimension of sustainability in experience value. The managerial implications of project findings can advance green transition in the tourism industry, enhance the understanding of the role, which destination brands play in encouraging sustainable behavior and fostering responsible guest practices. The activities in the project will also include the development of an evaluation tool and a concept sketch for a web-based app. 

Concerns about the effects of climate change have led to an interest in identifying ways to foster sustainability transitions. In the Global North, a key approach is to eventually eliminate dependence on carbon emitting energy while moving towards renewable sources, including wind power. Since wind farms require vast amounts of land, inevitably this explains the presence of such installations in many rural regions. This situation has alarmed various stakeholders, including those involved in tourism, who see such developments as threats to idyllic notions of rurality and, by default, to the transformation of the countryside for visitor experiences. Through a series of case studies in rural Sweden, we explore the attitudes of tourists towards the presence of wind farms in the landscape. Overall, study respondents recognize the need for such installations since most accept the necessity to embark on sustainable energy transitions. In this way, they understand that many parts of rural Sweden are transforming into spaces where sustainable energy future must be negotiated. Ultimately, sustainability transitions lead to the rethinking of conventional perceptions around rural space and tourism. We suggest that geographical research on sustainability transitions in tourism should account for conceptions of rurality that involve assemblages of imagination, place framing, and power relations in sustainability transitions. This conceptualization is necessary for achieving just and sustainable energy futures.

The customer-based destination brand equity model (CBDBE) captures knowledge about the complex relationships between tourists and tourism destination brands (e.g., Buhalis and Park, 2021; Chekalina, Fuchs and Lexhagen, 2018; Tran, Nguyen and Tran, 2021). Theoretically, the CBDBE model is derived from cognitive psychology and depicts tourists’ complex responses to a tourism destination’s name. The model aims to understand the multi-dimensional brand-related memory structures that tourists hold about a destination. As a managerial tool, the CBDBE model allows us to measure a destination brand’s strength and thus evaluate a destination’s marketing success. Destination managers use the CBDBE model to identify areas that allow them to upgrade destination marketing strategies, promotional campaigns and destination product development (Tran et al., 2019).

Following the philosopher and critical economist K-H. Brodbeck, in this chapter it is shown that modern economic science is incapable of properly capturing the nature of creativity. Thus, we critically reflect on notions of creativity as used in contemporary economic science and in its classical as well as ancient predecessors of economic thinking. After pointing at destructive consequences of innovations rooted in malevolent creativity, the Creativity Consequences Analytical Framework (Kampylis and Valtanen 2010) is introduced. On this base, the chapter aims at critically assessing motivations and intentions behind and expected consequences of entrepreneurial creativity in the Norwegian NBT sector. Policy implications and an agenda for future research are sketched in the conclusions.

In the nature-based tourism (NBT) context, mobile applications may contribute to major aspects of the travel process, from anticipation and planning to documentation and sharing of the outdoor experience. For destinations and service providers, mobile technologies serve the purpose of building, maintaining and improving customer relationships between destination suppliers, their customers as well as between customer-peers. Therefore, mobile customer-relationship management (CRM) applications can facilitate and improve the daily operational work in the small-scale NBT domain by optimally combining the key components of the NBT tourism system, i.e. recreation activities, lodging, food, infrastructures, transportation and other services and features of the servicescape, intelligently offered as ‘smart package’. After a brief state of the art review, the chapter presents findings from an explorative assessment of existing mobile apps designed for outdoor experience facilitation. The chapter provides theoretical and applied insights into the capacity of mobile technology for smart packaging of NBT products.

This chapter introduces the SAINT project and the slow adventure concept. The core pillars of the ‘slow adventure’ brand include elements such as human-powered slow journeys, inspiring connectedness with nature, wildlife watching opportunities, nature interpretation, local, wild or slow food as well as the honing of outdoor skills. These core pillars (or themes) are highly relevant to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involved in the SAINT project and constitute the essence of ‘slow adventure’ as a product concept. Typical nature-based activities available across the project area include expeditions into nature, overnight stays combined with nature experiences, wildlife viewing, hiking, recreational kayaking, canoeing and rowing, outdoor photography, as well as slow cooking and foraging. Most importantly, the ‘slow adventure’ product concept shapes the marketing message of the transnational cluster and brand, which companies can use to develop their product and reach the market. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of these marketing and cluster activities within the Nordic tourism context.