Zimbabwe awarded African rising star country branding award

Zimbabwe has been awarded the African Rising Star Country Branding Award from Bloom Consulting, a Spain-based company that focuses on strategy consulting and specialises in nation branding.

The award is given to a destination that showed extraordinary improvement on the tourism growth rate and enhanced focus on brand strategy. According to a report released by Bloom Consulting, Zimbabwe won having moved five places up to position 13 from 18 out of the 37 countries that were evaluated.

Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) chief executive Karikoga Kaseke said the achievement “means a lot especially from a destination marketing point of view and it’s an indication that brand Zimbabwe has a bright future. We will take seriously the citation by Bloom Consulting particularly areas where we are not doing well as a destination so that we can further improve our brand equity. Such areas include digital demand and online performance, we are already seized with those issues and working on them,” he said.

The overall purpose for the ranking was to measure the performance and effectiveness of each country brand from a tourism perspective. The measurement tool (algorithm methodology) which was used for these awards is premised mainly 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 the international visitors. This was derived from data indications circulated by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation on tourism receipts, that is, tourism receipts growth rate over a five-year period (2008 – 2012).

For digital demand, it was conducted through a measurement tool called Digital Demand. The tool searches for the total online search volume for tourism-related activities and attractions within each of the countries evaluated. The more online tourism-related activities a country has, the more appealing the brand is considered to be.

“As a sector, we will invest efforts in identifying areas of strategic joint marketing with various partners and stakeholders in order to further increase our brand visibility across all source markets,” Kaseke said.

www.zimbabwetourism.net