Destination Brands: Managing Place Reputation (3rd edition) was published recently by Elsevier. In the chapter ‘The ethical challenge’, Dr Keith Dinnie (Brand Horizons and Centre for Place Branding) considers the ‘Snow Country’ joint regional brand of three Japanese prefectures as an interesting case in the stakeholder management aspect of place branding:
In other contexts, stakeholders can also be identified at subnational regional level. For example, a network of stakeholders from seven different administrative areas within three bordering prefectures of Japan have come together to forge a collaborative strategy designed to simultaneously promote their individual place brands as well as their joint regional brand. The seven adminstrative areas are Tokamachi, Uonuma, Minamiuonuma, Tsunan, Sakae, Yuzawa, and Minakami.
It is highly unusual for administrative areas from three different prefectures to collaborate on such an initiative. The basis for this unusual collaboration lies in the common geographic and climatic characteristics shared by the seven areas – each area is mountainous and receives extremely heavy snowfall, which has until now stifled economic development due to inaccessability of the areas for half of every year. A prime driving force behind the collaborative campaign is to transform the consistently heavy snowfall from a weakness into a strength.
The lack of industrial development has a plus side in that the region can still offer an experience of ‘Old Japan’ through its unspoilt nature and traditional culture. A simple but powerful name has been chosen for the campaign: ‘Snow Country.’ For domestic tourists, this name is extremely evocative because it is also the title of a very famous book of the same name written by Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The book Snow Country is based in what has now been called the ‘Snow Country’ tourism zone.
Taken from Destination Brands: Managing Place Reputation (3rd ed.), edited by Nigel Morgan, Annette Pritchard and Roger Pride (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2011)
