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This paper takes Taiwan’s two major festivities known to the world as “Sky Lantern in the North; Beehive Fireworks in the South” as examples to probe into the benefits of tourism marketing brought by successful activities. Along with another example from Daxi Dried Tofu Festival in Taoyuan that is more and more popular in recent years, we analyze the tourism marketing strategies of the distinctive activities of New Taipei City and Tainan City for the references of Taoyuan in organizing activities and conducting marketing planning in the future.
Cities have local features and cultural contexts unique to their own. How to invite the world to appreciate a city’s uniqueness and people to learn about the charisma of the city and come to have a taste of it requires the planning, promotion as well as execution of a marketing strategy for tourism activities. Through organizing activities, a city’s heritage and its charm will shine; through collaboration with the local community, industries shall be developed in depth and benefits of tourism be introduced.
In terms of tourism development strategy, cities today are growing fond of the pattern of internationalizing local features. The more local it is, the more internationalized it shall be, which seems to be trendy nowadays as well. The most popular examples from Taiwan are Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival and Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival. The local communities organize activities to rapidly promote a city’s features to the international community, supporting local industries and highlighting local features in the process. Although it lacks an immediate, tremendous force like that of a mega event, such mode of tourism marketing ushers in more positive influence in the long run compared to that of the short-lived mega events such as cash-burning fireworks show. The planning for any given activity, besides attracting tourists and elevating the visibility worldwide, stresses more on the promotion of a tourism activity as a mean rooted deeply to the true sustainable development of local industries.
Taoyuan is the last city promoted as one of the municipalities. Hence, this paper aims to look into the three individual cases in Taiwan – “Sky Lantern in the North; Beehive Fireworks in the South”, the most representative activities of the two municipalities in the north and the south of Taiwan (New Taipei City and Tainan), as well as Daxi Dried Tofu Festival of Taoyuan that has been gaining its popularity in recent years. A multi-case study approach is employed for the research. Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival and Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival are based on data collection and analysis, while Daxi Dried Tofu Festival in-depth interview. Michael Porter’s Diamond Theory (1990) and Jay Barney’s Resource-Based Theory (1991) are utilized in the end for the overall discussion and analysis, so as to identify the key factors contributing to the successful tourism marketing strategies for Sky Lantern Festival of New Taipei City and Beehive Fireworks Festival of Tainan City. The relationships of tourism marketing with festivity and sustainable development shall be investigated via literature review.
This paper firstly collects the data and literature pertaining to tourism marketing strategy, festivity, sustainable development and satisfaction. Based on the three special activities of the three municipalities, materials of relevant historical backgrounds are collected. Then, analyses are conducted on different aspects using Diamond Theory and Resource-Based Theory to identify the effective pattern of tourism marketing. On top of that, we dive into the discussion of how the three century-old cities take the advantage of the existing features of the local industries and introduce support from the government, along with element of creativity, to draw the interests of the public once again and the attention from the international media to the activities. They not only have brought in crowds of tourists and economic benefits, but also fostered a sense of identity as well as pride of the local community along the way of organizing activities, and ultimately obtain a sustainable development of the activity and tourism benefits of international marketing. With the investigation of the tourism marketing patterns of New Taipei City and Tainan City, it shall serve as the reference for the future tourism marketing strategy of Taoyuan.
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