Reflections on the 5th Corfu Symposium on Managing & Marketing Places

By Heather Skinner,

The Corfu Symposium on Managing & Marketing Places is an annual event organised by the IPM and is dedicated to the theory and practice of place management and marketing. Unique among academic conferences, the Symposium offers scholars the opportunity to engage directly with place making, management and marketing issues as each year the event attracts place practitioners among our delegates and includes opportunities for all delegates to engage with local businesses, policy makers and other stakeholders.

The 5th Corfu Symposium on Managing & Marketing Places held 16th-19th April 2018 explored the utopian or dystopian visions associated with the place practices we study, promote or enact.

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Reflections on the Inaugural Meeting of the Academy of Marketing Place Marketing & Branding Special Interest Group

 

by Dr. Heather Skinner

Hosted by Staffordshire University, the Inaugural Meeting of the Academy of Marketing Place Marketing & Branding Special Interest Group (SIG) was held on Monday 4th December 2017. The meeting took the form of a workshop on “Researching, Writing, and Publishing in Place Marketing & Branding”, and focused on three key issues of interest:

  • Interdisciplinarity in place marketing and branding research;
  • Understanding what editors and reviewers want from place marketing and branding papers;
  • Setting out the research agenda for the SIG.

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Conference Report: 2nd Conference of the International Place Branding Association

by Dr Heather Skinner*

Conference Report

2nd Conference of the International Place Branding Association

5-9th December 2017

Marriott Hotel, Swansea, UK

Hosted by Swansea University, the 2nd Conference of the International Place Branding Association (IPBA) attracted place branding academics and practitioners from around the globe.

For me it was not only a great opportunity to return to my home country, Wales, but also a great opportunity to catch up with colleagues Renaud Vuignier, Viriya Taecharungroj, Laura Reynolds and Eli Avraham who have previously attended the Corfu Symposium on Managing & Marketing Places.

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Co-creation and Collaboration

Photograph: Ian Southerin – Location Photography

by Heather Skinner 

Themes from the 4th Corfu Symposium on Managing & Marketing Places 24-27 April 2017

Co-creation and Collaboration, between those responsible for managing and marketing places and a place’s stakeholders, and also between different places, also arose in many discussions at the recent 4th Corfu Symposium on Managing & Marketing Places, 24-27 April 2017.

The paper “Co-Constructing the Gaze: Existential Authenticity and Tourist Experience Co-Creation” presented by Maria Lichrou and co-authored with Lisa O’Malley and Maurice Patterson, all from the University of Limerick, also examined authenticity, but in relation to how authentic experience co-creation and engaging place marketing efforts could help capture diverse tourist roles and motivations. Continue reading “Co-creation and Collaboration”

Reflections from the 4th Corfu Symposium, Part II: Authenticity & Place

by Heather Skinner

Themes from the 4th Corfu Symposium on Managing & Marketing Places 24-27 April 2017

What constitutes an ‘authentic’ place? How do we define ‘authenticity’? What does this mean for the way we manage and market places? Some of these questions were raised in the following papers presented at the recent 4th Corfu Symposium on Managing & Marketing Places, 24-27 April 2017.

Gillian Rodríguez from the University of Central Lancashire, UK, was awarded the prize for Best Paper at the Symposium for her paper “The Local Consumers’ Gaze Interpreted as Regional Food Brand Essence”. Her research concerned creating effective regional food brands characterised by branding actions which do not have the food product details at their core.

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Reflections on the 4th Corfu Symposium on Managing & Marketing Places

Corfu Symposium Institute of Place Management Ares Kalandides
Photographer: Ian Southerin – Location Photography

By Heather Skinner*

The 4th Corfu Symposium on Managing & Marketing Places took place 24-27 April 2017 at the Mayor Mon Repos Palace Art Hotel. The Institute of Place Management (IPM) now organises the Symposium, and has once again provided formal accreditation for the event. The Symposium focuses on both theory and practice, on both knowledge production and its impact, and this is unusual at academic events. The IPM’s links with the Journal of Place Management and Development (JPMD) with its focus on communicating with academics, practitioners, policy makers and local government, is also a driving factor behind the balance between academic and practitioner input into this event, and a special issue of the JPMD (Volume 10 Number 2) has been devoted to a selection of papers from our past events related to the Special Issue theme of Responsible Tourism and Place Making.

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Developing capacity and capability in rural Albania

Dr Heather Skinner, Chair of the IPM’s Responsible Tourism SIG, has recently returned from 2 weeks teaching in Albania. Heather is one of a number of international academics that contribute to delivering the formal classroom based theory sessions for the BA Business and Economics at the Faculty of Business and Technology at Nehemiah Gateway University in rural Buçimas, a small town in the Pogradec Municipality in the Korçë region of Albania, located around 130 km from the nation’s capital, Tiranë.


by Heather Skinner

Albania, like many former communist countries across the European continent, has found that it is not always easy to overturn the impact of centralization to both education and to the economy, or to turn around educational concepts that have been ingrained over many years of a communist regime.

“Regional development becomes critical for a country where almost 60% of its population live in rural areas, where almost half are engaged in only small-scale subsistence based agricultural activities.”

This makes it difficult for the nation to reap the economic benefits of the creation of a growing liberalized free-market economy, particularly underpinned by forward looking entrepreneurial business and management programmes within an adaptive and supportive HE infrastructure. Continue reading “Developing capacity and capability in rural Albania”

Representations of Place in Music

Steve Knightly

by Dr Heather Skinner

I have always been interested in folk music, from being introduced to Welsh folk songs at school, and then through attendances at folk clubs in my teens, to much more recently when I ran a folk music club in my local town before I emigrated to Corfu in 2013. Around 15 years ago, at a folk festival in the South West of England, I first encountered the duo “Show of Hands”, although Steve Knightley and Phil Beer had been performing together as Show of Hands since the mid-1980s, and have performed as a trio with Miranda Sykes on and off since 2004. Show of Hands performs and records a mix of traditional and original songs. Apart from the sheer exuberance of the performers, what really struck me about their music was the inextricable link between their songs and the places about which the lyrics related. Indeed, the band’s own Facebook page stresses that “being rooted in Devon and the West Country … is part of the very fabric of this band and our material is closely entwined with its social history and geography”. Continue reading “Representations of Place in Music”

Attracting MICE: Business Tourists’ Perceptions of Destinations

Business tourists and MICE
By SwissTech Convention Center, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48342060

Dr Heather Skinner* has undertaken research into “Business Tourists’ Perceptions of Nation Brands and Capital City Brands: A comparison between Dublin / Republic of Ireland, and Cardiff / Wales”. Her research paper is soon to be published in the Journal of Marketing Management (JMM).

MICE is the acronym used for the highly lucrative Meetings, Incentives, Conferences/Conventions and Events/Exhibitions market, and is often used to describe various forms of business tourism. The International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) is the industry body for the global meetings industry, using a definition of business tourism as ‘the provision of facilities and services to the millions of delegates who annually attend meetings, congresses, exhibitions, business events, incentive travel and corporate hospitality’.

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Best paper award at the Academy of Marketing

AM2016 presentationby Dr Heather Skinner

The Academy of Marketing conference attracts over 350 international marketing academics each year. Last year I was very privileged to be awarding the prize for Best Paper in the Place Marketing and Branding Track to the winners, this year I was even more delighted to win this Best Paper in Track prize myself. I have been attending the Academy of Marketing conference since 2001, and over the years have presented research on a wide range of subjects, but mainly on issues relating to Place Marketing and Branding, with my first ever paper “How Cymru Became Cool: An Examination of Wales’ Culture Production System 1990 – 2000” being based on work arising from my masters’ thesis. In 2008, at the Academy of Marketing Conference held in Aberdeen, I was awarded not only Best Paper in the Reflective Marketing Track, but also Best Paper in Conference overall for my work “The emergence and development of Place Marketing’s confused identity”, a full version of which was then published that year in the Journal of Marketing Management. Continue reading “Best paper award at the Academy of Marketing”