In December 2009, due to the Northern Cape’s failure to raise its domestic and international market share, the decision was taken to change the branding of the province previously branded as ‘Destination Northern Cape’. The introduction in the official 2010 Northern Cape travel guide reads as follows:
The Northern Cape is… a land of many diverse cultures, of frontier history and brave missionaries with countless challenges for the adventurer… this is a destination that you can’t just read about or just drive through, but a destination you have to participate in. It’s a destination of real experiences, not conjured up theme parks, but the real thing, waiting for real people to explore it. (Northern Cape Tourism Authority, 2010/11:1)
Attention to landscape and culture is not uncommon in destination-branding strategies, where cultural and heritage assets significantly feature, “…for they represent a community’s unique features that evoke strong emotional ties between the tourist and the destination” (McKercher
& Du Cros, 2002:155). In this way, destinations attempt to differentiate themselves from their competitors, acquire a competitive advantage and stake a place in the consumer’s mind (ibid;
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cf. Jarrett 1996; Aaker 1995; Bonn & Brand 1995; Bharadwaj, Varadarajan & Fahy 1993).
Processes of globalisation have produced places so similar characteristically in service and facilities that there is now a critical need for destinations to create a distinctive identity to differentiate themselves from competitors (Morgan, Pritchard & Pride 2002:11; cf. Blain, Levy & Ritchie 2005). The destination brand is thus a powerful marketing tool in confronting increasing product substitutability, parity, and competition (Morgan et al. 2002:11).
The new slogan ‘Northern Cape Real’ highlights the sense of ‘lived experience’ that a visit to the province would create. This echoes Britain’s ‘Campaign for Real Holidays’ conducted in the 1980s and resulting in a travel guide The Independent Guide to Real Holidays Abroad:
The Complete Directory for the Independent Traveller (Barrett, 1989). According to the guide, a real holiday must have two main characteristics: i) it must involve “visiting somewhere well away from where the mass of the population will be visiting”; and ii) “the real holiday-maker will use small specialist agents/operators to get to their destination”
(Barrett 1989, cited in Urry, 1990:95). In short, ‘real’ holidays involve travel rather than tourism, the romantic rather than the collective gaze79 and small niche markets rather than mass markets (ibid).
The description of a holiday in the Northern Cape as set out in the provincial tourism brochure articulates these same themes. The Northern Cape is described as a destination in which to participate. In being actively engaged the visitor is made to have a personal experience of the place. The “real experience” is set against a “conjured up theme park”
which simultaneously posits the romantic against the collective gaze and a select niche against a mass market (Northern Cape Tourism Authority, 2010/11:1). According to Urry, the collective gaze “involves high levels of audience participation”, while the romantic gaze is much more solitary and elitist, requiring substantial cultural capital (1990:86). Phrases like
“endless plains of dust”, “silence”, “unspoiled”, “solitude” in the Northern Cape tourism brochure suggest that the romantic gaze is encouraged (cf. Northern Cape Tourism Authority,
79 The tourist gaze is both “socially organised and systematised” (Urry, 1990:1). While his book is titled The Tourist Gaze (1990), John Urry acknowledges that there is “no single tourist gaze as such” but rather a variety of gazes constructed through difference and varying according to society, social group and historical period (1990:1). It is therefore not a homogenous gaze but depends upon contrasting forms of non-touristic experience that may be particular to each tourist. These different gazes imply different tourist practices and are “authorised in terms of a variety of discourses” which include, for example, health, play, enlightenment, education, and group solidarity (1990:135). The tourist gaze is directed to those features separate from the visitor’s everyday experience, taken to be “in some sense out of the ordinary” (1990:3).
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2010/11:1). A further implication is that a visitor to a “conjured up theme park” is just as counterfeit as the place visited, while travellers to a destination as “real” as the Northern Cape are individuals who share in that realness (ibid). They are themselves everything the word ‘real’ implies: authentic, genuine, original, unquestionable and true.
In addition to promoting its large open spaces, the Northern Cape’s brand emphasis now also includes adrenaline and extreme sports. The Northern Cape Race, a reality TV series shot in the province in 2009 as well as the use of a Kalahari pan to break the world land speed record prompted an emphasis in marketing the ‘extreme’ nature of the province and resulted in the
‘Northern Cape Extreme’ brand consisting of three parts: ‘extreme sport’, ‘extreme nature’, and ‘extreme culture’. The first two concepts include 4x4 trails, marathons, and camping.
Extreme culture, however, is a term loaded with political, culturally hierarchical and racial undertones. Extreme tourism is usually indicative of adventure, adrenaline sports and other activities. In a presentation at the 2009 Heritage in Tourism conference, Johann van Schalkwyk, from the Northern Cape provincial Department of Economic Development and Tourism, expressed that while ‘adventure’ is an intended connotation in the new ‘extreme’
brand, it is ‘diversity’ and ‘difference’ of peoples, cultures and landscapes that is the main focus of the brand (Fieldnotes, September 2009).
At a seminar hosted at Wildebeest Kuil and attended by researchers from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, research associates and colleagues based in Kimberley, Van Schalkwyk, described three important goals that could be achieved via the extreme culture branding strategy, namely: job creation, rural development, and sustainable cultural development (Fieldnotes, June 2010). He described the Northern Cape as a province with many diverse cultures and a generous resource for tourism ventures. The question he then posed was this:
“Is cultural identity holy ground?” (ibid). Van Schalkwyk noted that “extreme does not mean that the people are extreme”, however, following this he divulged that “the Nama people feel we are extremising [sic] them” (ibid). He went on to argue that within on-going debates about representation and identity, narrow mindsets need to be broadened. In this vein, Van Schalkwyk expressed a desire for the province’s new brand to move away from images of the
‘extreme primitive’ and toward a “rich mix of cultural experiences” from within which the notion of ‘extreme’ culture would be understood as ‘diverse’ (ibid).
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In response to the question of whether myths pertaining to culture should be expelled or capitalised upon, a member of the South African San Institute (SASI) replied that San groups should be made part of the capitalising of First People myths and receive benefits from its presentation. Van Schalkwyk’s response was that the extreme brand would translate into economic opportunity for the province as a whole as well as for those communities involved in local tourism ventures. Alluding to Erving Goffman’s (1959) front-back dichotomy,80 Meryl-Joy Windschut, director of SASI, observed that local communities involved in cultural tourism ventures need to be made aware of their rights to present that which they wish to showcase and to maintain as private that which they wish to remain undisclosed, stipulating also that the tourist should respect when things are not for public display (Fieldnotes, June 2010). In this way, Windschut touched upon the unequal relations of power between tourists and their indigenous hosts.
Conflicts may certainly arise if consultation with custodians is absent, particularly regarding their asset in the marketplace “and if [its] positioning strategy is inimical with their own needs” (McKercher & Du Cros, 2002:156). This is possible in destination branding strategies where tangible and intangible attributes associated with the brand are bundled together and presented as a single-minded product geared toward meeting the guest’s needs and wants (McKercher & Du Cros 2002; Dev, Morgan & Shoemaker 1995). Attractions are bundled into themed products, and these themes are usually created by “public- or private-sector tourism marketing agencies and not by the owners/operators of the attractions being promoted” (McKercher & Du Cros, 2002:156). Partnerships between the different stakeholders are a means to overcome conflicts. Partnerships will work if the power balance is roughly equal among stakeholders and if “their goals are compatible” (ibid). Different goals and power imbalances will often lead to the stronger party achieving its goals at the expense of the weaker. This concern is especially relevant “if the commodification occurs by second and third parties that have no direct association with the tangible or intangible asset being promoted”; moreover “[i]f it is in the best commercial interest of the tourism industry to promote a different message, it will do so” (ibid). As discussed in Chapter Six a critical reflexivity practiced by all stakeholders may work to balance out contending objectives.
80 The front-back dichotomy describes a structural division between that which the audience/tourist/viewer is privy to (the front) and the place to which performers retire (the back) (cf. MacCannell, 1973).
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