Nation Branding Bhutan book by Shanleygrace

BHUTAN

Nation Branding Volume I

The Stud Bhutan, the fabled Shangri-La, first opened its doors to tourism in 1974. Since then the tourism industry has grown to be one of the largest contributors to the country’s GDP, and is coined as a

“high value, low impact” industry. In order to compete in the global

marketplace, Bhutan adopted efforts to brand a uniform image of the country that displays its policies surrounding Gross National cultural heritage, and a ‘pristine’ environment.

Happiness, strong

The study focuses on analyzing how nation branding in Bhutan functions as a

savoir as defined by the work of Foucoult and in turn can affect the way tourists comprehend and interact with the country’s environment.

dy Questions How does Bhutan’s strategic branding have an effect on the way tourists’ value and behave within the country’s environment? Can marketing Bhutan’s environment as ‘pristine’ can actually create behaviors that help preserve it? This study found some preliminary connections between branding, tourist’s values, and their environmental behaviors. It can close gaps in research, and help Bhutan’s tourism industry continue to disseminate marketing campaigns that influences more environmentally friendly behaviors, and can contribute to keeping tourism in Bhutan low volume, high impact.

Introdu Bhutan first opened its doors to tourism in

1974. This was around the same time that Gross National Happiness launched as Bhutan’s framework for national development. The creation of GNH set the stage for how tourism has expanded and has been handled through the years. In the beginning, the tourism industry was handled exclusively by the government’s Department of Tourism. The approach to tourism in these early years was aimed at “high value, low volume”, which

was achieved by charging a high daily tariff. The tariff successfully pushed economic

development forward while still limiting the number of tourists who could visit the country due to the high cost. By late

1980’s, the number of tourists in Bhutan had continued to rise despite the high prices. The Government combated this growth by raising the tariff to 250 USD per day during the season and the price has hardly changed since then. Not long after the tariff raise, the Bhutanese government decided to privatize the tourism industry. This allowed private tour companies to open up in the place of the government’s Department of Tourism in 1991; full privatization did not occur until 1999.

uction Once fully privatized, the tourism sector had no limits on how many private tourism companies could open up. This significantly increased the size of the tourism industry and in turn created incentive for these growing private tourism companies to market Bhutan to the international eye and potential tourists. Using nation branding to market Bhutan as a pristine, authentic, and protected culture and environment attracts increased numbers of tourists. As Bhutan develops, can tourism create an incentive to protect the country’s culture and environment, since tourism accounts for a large portion of Bhutan’s GDP? This study focuses on analyzing how nation branding

functions as a savoir and in turn can affect the way tourists comprehend and interact with the country’s environment. Does nation branding directly influence or manipulate tourist’s perceptions and behaviors? How does Bhutan’s strategic branding have an effect on the way tourists’ value and behave within the country’s environment? To address these questions, semi-structured interviews investigated whether or not nation branding advantageously affects tourists’ values and behaviors towards Bhutan’s environment. Can marketing Bhutan’s environment as “pristine” actually influence behaviors that help preserve it?

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6 Nation Branding Nation Branding is typically defined as “a

compendium of discourses and practices aimed at reconstituting nationhood through marketing and branding paradigms.” (Risen, 2005) or “a process by which a nation’s images can be created, monitored, evaluated and proactively managed in order to improve or enhance the country’s reputation among a target international audience”

Brand Bhutan In terms of how these definitions manifest practically, nation branding spans from surface level or exterior branding such as the creation of national slogans, logos, and color palettes - to “institutionalize branding within state structures by creating governmental and pseudo-governmental bodies that oversee long-term nation branding efforts.” (Kaneva, 2009) GNH and Brand Bhutan are two ways that Bhutan is implementing institutionalized nation branding. Brand Bhutan is an initiative

and partnership with the design agency Future Brand to “create a strategy and visual identity to tell a compelling story for Bhutan and its products and services in an increasingly competitive global market”. (FutureBrand, 2014) FutureBrand’s chair of the Asia-Pacific operation, Susie Hunt, explains that: be it in terms of values or economy, branding Bhutan would provide the country with a strategy to articulate what makes Bhutan special. This image should be aligned with Bhutan’s national objectives.

Nation Branding as a Savoir Nation branding functions as a savoir because “it reconstitutes nations both at the levels of ideology, and of praxis, whereby the meaning and experiential reality of nationhood itself is transformed in ways that are yet to be fully understood.” (Kaneva, 2007) There are multiple ways that scholars approach nation branding. A few of these approaches include technical-economic approaches, political approaches, and cultural approaches.

Technical-economic approaches are studies that are

usually written by marketing scholars who understand that designing a

strategic and unified brand has the power to give a country a competitive upper hand within our current global marketplace. (Calabrese, 1999; Habermas, 2001) A rational that is predominate within this technical-economic perspective is that the differences between the methods used while branding a country, and the techniques used while branding a corporation are indecipherable. People within a country can be “motivated and inspired and manipulated” with the use of the same tactics that companies use to brand themselves and sell products. (Aronczyk, 2008)

8 Political approaches on the other

hand state that, “By managing their reputations strategically, nations can advance their interests in the international arena” (Wang, 2008). Scholars taking this approach see branding as a new form of nationalism that disseminates national values into a projected collective identity (Anholt, 2008). “It is a nation or leader’s image and control of information flows, and not just their military and economic power, that help determine their status in the international community” (Gilboa, 2001). Scholars taking a

cultural approach argue that nation branding reproduces and enhances stereotypes to international communities. (Widler, 2007) This plays out dramatically within tourism

advertising because the industry has a tendency to reproduce stereotypical representations entirely for the purpose of selling them back to Western audiences. (Hasseler, 2008). Nation branding can be analyzed as an ideological project that conceives commercialized values of a country’s landscape, and nationhood in relation to neoliberalism. In other words, branding not only explains nations to the world but also reinterprets national identity in market terms and provides new narratives for international consumption and behavior. The data from this study was analyzed in a way that takes all of these approaches into consideration.

Tourism & the Environment There are a number of ways in which mass tourism has helped to amplify concern for the environment. First, tourism enables a much wider range of environments to be gazed upon. (Urry, 1990) Tourists are able to compare different landscapes to each other, which could incentivize nation branding. Images of “appropriate” environments can now be much more readily conjured up, evaluated and compared, often through people's own photographs or through programs seen on the TV, Urry explains. The interest in environment and the growth of tourism both derive from the increased importance of visual consumption in modern society. They are based on an aesthetic judgment rather than one with a foundation of reason and discourse (Lash, 1990). The romantic tourist gaze feeds into and

supports attempts to protect the environment, in a cyclical manner. “It is because of tourism that many national parks have been created and without them many animal and plant species would have disappeared” (Hamilton, 1990). This quote suggests that tourists actually affect policies regarding conservation when they exert pressure to protect the environment so that it can be maintained for visual consumption. This phenomenon can be termed as ‘aesthetic conservation’ – to conserve an environment in accordance with pre-given conceptions of beauty. How can destination image influence tourism in that area? This study is a preliminary demonstration of how these different “tourist gazes” in Bhutan may impact values, behaviors, and policies placed on the subjected environments.

10 The tourism literature indicates that destination image has a large effect on how tourists place values on that landscape along with their attitudes and behaviors with in that space. However, the relationships between nation branding, and behavior of tourists in Bhutan has not yet been examined simultaneously; this study is a prefatory effort to begin to close that gap within research. Understanding the power of nation branding and if it tangibly has an affect on foreigners’ perceptions and behaviors within that country can be extremely

valuable for comprehending or implementing an overarching agenda. This type of research can help both tourists and people working within the tourist industry reflect on how Brand Bhutan functions as a savoir in their lives by disseminating values about Bhutan’s culture and environment. It can contribute to better understanding of the way nation branding and marketing influences environmental behaviors among tourists within Bhutan’s environment. This understanding can contribute to developing market strategies that help keep the tourism industry truly “high value, low impact”.

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The method for this research entailed semi-structured interviews with tourists (international and regional), tour guides, and businesses associated with tourism (hotels, restaurants, handicraft stores). The research focused on areas with high influxes of tourists and industry associates such as tshechu’s, hotels, and popular cafes. The data was collected in four locations: Chamkhar and surrounding villages Jambay Lhakhang Drub, Jakar Dzong tshechu, and Chorkortoe. The data collection occurred over the course of eleven days by four student researchers. Each researcher had a different sub-question that contributed to the project as a whole. These sub-questions/categories included: evaluating the current state and perceptions of tourism infrastructure within Bumthang and Bhutan, evaluating the environmental concern of people functioning within the tourism industry, researching the tourist gaze within imagery, and extrapolating if Bhutan’s strategic branding has an effect on the way tourists’ value and behave in the country’s environment. The research team had a list of about 70 questions split up in sections that related to each sub-question.

12 The questions were both qualitative and quantitative. The questionnaire was printed out and on hand during the interviews, but the structure was conversational and the researchers went “off script” if relevant questions arose that could supplement the research. Each interview lasted about thirty minutes, and were both audio recorded (with interviewee approval) and transcribed. The questions that related to the sub-question that will be explored in this paper were primarily qualitative and focused on questions that could give insight on how tourists value the landscape, what they heard about Bhutan before arriving and from what sources, issues they find to be most pressing, how they perceive their responsibility to Bhutan’s environment, and environmental actions/ behaviors they engage in back home verses in Bhutan. When it came to data analysis, it proved to be beneficial to examine both the qualitative and quantitative data results, in order to get a holistic understanding of the findings and investigate patterns/ correlations between branding, the tourist’s environmental values, and their behaviors.

Results When Bhutan brands itself to tourists the two main things it puts an emphasis on are its policies of Gross National Happiness, and its protected environment.

The questionnaire asked tourists, tour guides, and individuals associated with the tourist industry to rank a list of issues in order from most important to least important. The issues we provided were: Environmental issues Economic growth, Social inequality, Food security, Access to education, Urban migration, and Happiness/wellbeing.

The top two most important issues (“environment” and “happiness”) accounted for 60.3% of the total. 38.5% overall said that environmental issues are the most pressing, and 29.2% said that happiness and wellbeing is most important issue.

Most Pressing Issues According to Tourists

Most Pressing Issues According to Tour Guides

Economic

Environment

Happiness

Education

Tourists statistically put a large focus on Happiness as the most important issue on the list. 56.3% of tourists said that happiness and wellbeing is most important, while 25% of them said that environmental issues are the most pressings. Bhutan’s tag line “happiness is a place” is on almost every tourism marketing collateral, and is a phrase tourist see constantly while in the country and before arriving.

Tour guides provide the primary sources of information that the tourists receive, so their values about Bhutan’s environment is passed to the tourists they are guiding. The tour guides receive training on how and what to talk about to tourists. The interviews revealed that most guides receive training by the Tourism Council in Thimphu on Bhutanese culture, history, and environment.

The values that individuals functioning with in the tourist industry possess, relates directly to the marketing discourses that Bhutan puts the most emphasis on and the things it hopes to be known for in an international community: Gross National Happiness and environmental conservation. It appears that disseminating these values to both tourists and Bhutanese people working within the tourist industry has been successful.

The figure above depicts that 40% of tour guides said that environmental issues are the most pressing issues, and 20% of guides said that happiness and wellbeing is most important. Statements like: “Bhutan is already a happy country so although happiness is important, it is not something that needs to be worked on. On the other hand the environment is something that should be actively protected.” (Rinchen, 2016) supplemented these statistics. Approximately seven of the guides who chose environment as the most important issue mentioned Gross National Happiness as already being a success in the country.

Tourist When the tourists were asked why they wanted to come to Bhutan, many of them mentioned an interest in GNH, the scenery and culture, and the fact that not many tourists are able to visit Bhutan. They expressed that it is place that is unlike anywhere else. A few tourists explained that they like to go to places that they think are going to change quite fast in the future so that they can experience it and see it in person before it does. When we inquired further about what they meant, they said that they think Bhutan is eventually going

to become “westernized” and they wanted to experience it before that happens. They expressed their interest in Bhutan’s “traditional” culture and protected landscape and articulated their surprise at how “modern” Bhutan is. This type of surprise at modern relates directly to the tourist gaze and the type of landscapes that tourists typically expect to see while visiting a country that is branded as “traditional and ancient”. Increasingly much tourism is concerned with visually consuming a natural environment.

Gaze The “tourist gaze” has increased tremendously in the past decades due to the expanding modes of transportation that give tourists the means to gaze on often geographically distant environments. (Urry, 1990) Widespread construction of tourist attractions and concentrations of people into particular places has created a variety of transformations on the environment and how people perceive and interact with it. (ibid) The way people ‘read’ nature is something that is learned and changes across time and cultures. Tourism has created an entirely new method for ‘reading’ nature that can be defined simply as visual consumption. Often, tourism has become “a search for the photogenic,” which has further boosted the development of tourism in areas where landscapes appear visually environmentally unpolluted can be viewed and captured. Thus photography has magnified the contradictions associated with the relationship between tourism and the environment. Modern tourism has increased the attractions of particular kinds of unpolluted landscapes and therefore demands to protect or conserve such environments. As numbers of visitors seeking to capture the

views of a preserved landscape increases, they impair the very environments they want to preserve. During the interviews, the researchers showed tourists ten photos of various landscapes in Bhutan. Some of the photos had people in them, some had cameras in them, some photos only had photos of nature, and some of Dzongs. A handful of the photos were pulled from websites advertising Bhutan the other photos featured(Rinchen 2016) were taken by tourists while they were in Bhutan. This section of the research gives insight on the types of things tourists hope to see while in the country and the types of landscapes they value. The researchers in this study asked the tourists which photo looks most like the reason why they came to Bhutan and they overwhelmingly picked a photo of Tigers Nest, which happens to be the most marketed image of Bhutan by far. The photos tourists typically disliked, were photos with evidence of humans in them, aside from farmers in a rice field. The humans or human evidence they preferred not to see in the images were other tourists or cameras.

Conclusion

The findings of this research gave evidence of some correlations between branding and the values that tourists have about Bhutan’s environment. These findings simply give preliminary evidence, and can be a jumping off point for further research to be conducted. Although this study revealed what may be evidence of Bhutan’s nation branding efforts influencing values and behaviors, the findings are not sufficient enough to make any concrete conclusions. In order to gain a better understanding on how Bhutan’s strategic branding has an effect on the way tourists’ value and behave within the country’s environment, a more in depth data collection and analysis must be conducted. It would be beneficial to talk to key informants like individuals involved in the creation of Brand Bhutan, policy makers in the tourism industry, individuals who train tour guides on how to talk about Bhutan’s culture and environment to tourists, and designers for various websites, and ads, for tourism in Bhutan. Another gap within this research was the lack of interviews with regional tourists. A majority of the tourists interviewed were foreign tourists who pay the daily tariff, have guides and who are targeted the most by branding collateral. It would be beneficial to compare and contrast the different ways in which regional tourists and foreign tourists view Bhutan’s overall brand and image. How are they targeted or marketed to in different ways? Do the differences in marketing influence environmental behaviors between the demographics that differ from each other? These are questions that should be addressed if this research is expanded and further pursued. Another gap in the research conducted was the fact that many of the qualitative questions did not produce enough insight on how tourists were being directly influenced by nation branding collateral.

The qualitative questions should be re-designed in a way that can provide more explicit data that can give insight on if there are connections between nation branding, values, and behaviors. The research design should also be revised in a way that includes more quantitative questions. During the data analyses process, the quantitative results (although they had less depth) were easier to analyze and compare to each one another and therefore could reveal more direct connections. Researching how Bhutan’s strategic branding has an effect on the way tourists’ value and behave within the country’s environment can give insight into the power that marketing has on behaviors. Before this preliminary research, tourists and their tour guides have never been interviewed in a way that sheds light on the relationship between the way Bhutan “brands” itself, and the way the tourists and individuals within the tourism industry view or treat the environment. On a larger scale, understanding the power of nation branding and if it tangibly has an affect on foreigner’s perceptions and behaviors within Bhutan can be valuable for international affairs regarding environmental conservation. If further research reveals more explicitly that marketing Bhutan’s environment as “pristine” actually creates behaviors that help preserve it, then this will help Bhutan’s tourism industry continue to disseminate marketing campaigns that influences more environmentally friendly behaviors, and can contribute to keeping tourism in Bhutan low volume, high impact.

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