adminBusiness Correspondent
ZIMBABWE tourism has once again caught international recognition by winning the African Rising Star Country Branding Award courtesy of Bloom Consulting, a Spanish-based strategy consulting firm that specialises in national branding. The award is testimony of Zimbabwe Tourism Authority’s strides in enhancing the country’s brand and improvements on the growth of the sector. According to Bloom Consulting report, Zimbabwe won the Rising Star Award, having moved five places up from position 18 to 13 of the 37 African countries evaluated.
ZTA chief executive Mr Karikoga Kaseke paid tribute to the advocates and custodians of the brand Zimbabwe, “A World of Wonders”, who continue to promote the brand across major tourism markets.
“We are excited to be recipients of this high status award. This achievement means a lot especially from a destination marketing point of view and it is an indication that brand Zimbabwe has a bright future and we will take seriously the citation by Bloom Consulting firm, particularly areas where we are not doing well as a destination so that we can further improve our brand equity,” he said.
He also expressed optimism in consolidating the sector performance and further improve to top 10 in the coming three years and will invest in identifying areas of strategic joint marketing with various partners and stakeholders in order to further increase the brand visibility across all source markets.
The measurement tool (algorithm methodology) that was used for the awards was mainly premised on four variables namely, economic performance, digital demand, country branding strategy rating and online performance.
Economic performance looked at the country’s success to achieve financial gain from international visitors and data was provided by United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) on tourism receipts, that is tourism growth rate for over a five-year period (2008-2012).
It is during this period of time that the tourism ministry and ZTA went on an aggressive campaign selling the Zimbabwean brand that earned the country recognition to consequently host the UNWTO General Assembly.
The country branding strategy rating evaluated the accuracy of the strategy by each National Tourism Organisation (NTO) for all the countries through the comparative analysis of brand tags as measured by the digital demand tool (40 brand tags grouped in five key topics; culture, leisure, outdoors, niche markets and target markets), the more the NTO focused, the more it received higher rankings.
On online performance, digital strategic positioning of each country was evaluated based on the web analytics and social media data. The higher the online diffusion through websites or other online platforms was, the greater the brand’s overall success.
The award comes at a time when the country is still celebrating the 2015 Routes Destination Marketing Award handed over to the ZTA on June 1.
Online Reporter