Managing Heritage Tourism Brand in South Africa: A Synthesis of Literature

This paper aims to explore how branding essentials can foster or derail heritage tourism growth. Brand management capabilities support heritage tourism destinations such as South Africa to achieve competitive advantage in the global tourism marketplace. Heritage tourism destinations in Africa operate within a highly competitive environment as most of them offer identical products and services to their clientele. Unique historical and political backgrounds associated with particular geographical regions foster their heritage tourism growth. Subsequently, in South Africa, different forms of tourism that exist within the heritage tourism niche such as cultural tourism have gained immense popularity as they attract numerous domestic and international tourists to heritage tourism sites. Branding as a composite of numerous essentials including, but not confined to, brand essence, brand image and brand loyalty, is believed to be a key factor that can either stimulate or hinder heritage tourism growth in tourist destinations including South Africa. A conceptual model has been developed in this paper, based on the interlinkages between the key essentials of destination branding and how they influence heritage tourism growth. This paper posits that there is a strong relationship and interrelatedness between destination branding and heritage tourism growth.