Copenhagen as a Creative Chinese Destination: An Explorative Study of City Branding and Independent Chinese Travellers

Abstrakt

Branding of nations and cities has become crucial today, as global tourism has become much more competitive. Therefore, national tourism strategies must differentiate and offer some unique attributes in order to target the world’s tourists. The purpose of this research erupts from the Danish Growth Strategy (2014b) published by the Ministry of business and growth, which introduced some fundamental efforts toward Danish tourism. The strategy highlights the new initiatives of Danish tourism toward 2020, which includes three fundamental efforts, which are concerned with a new and improved cooperation in Danish tourism, a boost of the Danish service level through improved services and experiences, and a new and improved focus toward Chinese tourism. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to investigate what Danish stakeholders have done in order to obtain a higher experience level, and how they have allocated resources toward the independent Chinese travellers to ensure an international competitive position. Today, the Chinese market is the fastest growing market in Europe, and as for Denmark, it has become the most important market, if we do not include the neighboring countries. However, many considerations and efforts have been done in order to target the Chinese market, and still a lot needs to be considered as the Chinese traveller’s desires and needs are changing. Today, the Chinese travellers are independent, they are much younger, better educated and request adventures, authenticity and local specialties beyond the beaten track, in order to experience the local culture. To deal with these more demanding and modern tourists a new and innovative strategy has been implemented in Copenhagen that provides localhood for everyone and encourages interaction between the global (the tourists) and the locals (the citizens). Moreover, in order to deliver value-for-money two innovative projects has been executed in the Danish service and tourism industry. First, the NICE 2.0 project has introduced a new and innovative way of thinking the service encounter, which encourage interaction and conversation, while the Chinavia+ project are more concerned with the Chinese culture and aims to improve the experiences and the functional services toward the Chinese tourists. Findings from this research show that there is still a lot to consider, when targeting the independent Chinese travellers. Thus, Danish stakeholders need to consider the cooperation and efforts in term of services and experiences toward this demanding market, as the number of Chinese visitors, at the moment, is higher in Sweden and Norway.