An investigation into digital place marketing practices of selected South African local municipalities and communities

[摘要] Places such as town or city municipalities and communities should market themselves toattract and retain skilled middle and higher income residents, businesses, investors andtourists because these typical place marketing target audiences are key role players inlocal economic development. However, as the world economy becomes increasinglyglobalised, these target audiences are more mobile than ever and therefore placescompete directly with each other to attract and retain them. It is therefore increasinglyimportant for places to deliberately engage in place marketing, and to do so efficiently.Modern place marketing practices necessitate the use of digital marketing channelsbecause these are the media channels most used by the desired target audiences, asopposed to traditional media for information searches to make place selection choices.Today, the most efficient place marketing channels are websites, blogs, social media,online review and directory sites, wikis and mobile apps.The research hypothesis for this study is that South African municipalities and typicalstakeholder groups within those municipal areas that naturally assume the role ofmarketing of their towns or areas do not make proper use of digital place marketingpractices. Twenty South African municipal areas (local municipalities and their maintowns) were selected as case studies to test this hypothesis. The actual digital placemarketing activities of these municipalities or towns were compared to digital placemarketing best practice, using evaluative web content analysis research methods. Thisentailed searching the internet and social media for the places' web and social mediapresence and digital marketing practices and to assess the quality thereof. Actual digitalmarketing practices of the case study places were measured against a list of criteria usinga rating scale devised by the author. This enabled the comparison of actual practiceagainst ideal digital marketing strategies as identified during the literature research partof the dissertation. The results clearly show that digital place marketing practices arepoorly adopted by the case study places.

[发布机构] University of the Free State