Repositioning the Swellendam Municipal Area as a Tourist Destination: Trends, Destination Marketing and Place Branding

In 2017 the Swellendam Tourism Bureau’s board adopted a new marketing brand for the municipality under the banner Cape Trade Route. The brand was introduced without using any market intelligence to inform it. The Swellendam Municipality subsequently resolved that any new tourism strategy had to be informed by current market research, including media, trade and industry sentiments about the region. This paper reports on five sets of empirical evidence collected by various means to better understand Swellendam’s tourism brand and marketing strategies. They are (1) workshops with business and community roleplayers; (2) an online questionnaire survey conducted with tourist-aligned enterprises in the Swellendam municipal area; (3) a content analysis of traditional and social media relating to Swellendam; (4) a visitor interview survey; and (5) a snap review of sixteen tour operators’ opinions about Swellendam as a tourism region. The findings highlight the crucial role of sound market intelligence in creating tourism marketing strategies for municipalities. The reported findings and the recommendations made have subsequently informed the municipality’s spatial development framework and tourism strategy.