Chapter 8 Destinations Are Not Products
The language of destination marketing has colonized our thinking about places. Destinations have brand identities, unique selling propositions, competitive advantages, and market positions. They are developed, promoted, managed, and refreshed like any consumer product. This language is so normalized that it no longer requires justification. It is simply how tourism professionals talk about places.
This chapter argues that the product framing is not just inaccurate but harmful. Places are not products. Treating them as products produces specific harms to residents, ecosystems, and places themselves. The alternative is not no framework but a different framework: places as living systems with their own integrity that must be respected.
Begin with what products are. Products are made by producers for consumers. They exist to satisfy consumer needs or desires. They have no interests of their own. They can be modified to match market demand. They can be discontinued when they no longer sell. Products are objects in the most basic sense: things to be used by subjects for the subjects' purposes.
None of this applies to places. Places are not made; they emerge through historical processes involving geology, ecology, and human activity. They do not exist to satisfy consumer needs; they exist because inhabitants created communities there. They have interests, or at least the inhabitants and ecosystems have interests that are inseparable from the place itself. They cannot be infinitely modified without destroying what makes them places. And they certainly cannot be discontinued.
The product framing ignores these features because marketing requires them to be ignored. Marketing creates a representation of the place that abstracts from its concrete particularity. The brand is not the place. The brand is an image, a set of associations, a promise. The divergence between brand and reality is not a bug but a feature. Marketing succeeds precisely by constructing images more desirable than any reality could be.
Consider destination branding in practice. A branding exercise begins with market research: what do potential visitors want, and what associations will attract them? The brand is then constructed to match these desires, emphasizing features that appeal and suppressing features that do not. The result is a representation that may bear little relationship to how residents experience their home.
When Iceland brands itself as a land of fire and ice, it creates an imaginary. When Paris brands itself as the city of love, it creates an imaginary. When New Zealand brands itself as Middle-Earth, it creates an imaginary. These imaginaries are not false in a simple sense; the features they emphasize exist. But they are partial in ways that distort. They select from the full complexity of a place the elements useful for marketing and discard the rest.
The imaginary then feeds back into the place. Tourists arrive expecting to find what the brand promised. They are disappointed or pleased based on conformity to expectation. Places face pressure to become more like their brands, to perform the imaginary for paying audiences. The authentic becomes what matches the marketed image, a strange inversion in which the copy precedes the original.
This dynamic can transform places in harmful ways. Amsterdam's reputation for liberal attitudes toward drugs and sex draws visitors seeking those experiences. The city becomes increasingly organized around providing them. Residents who are not involved in those industries find their city remade around them. The brand has shaped the reality it was supposed to represent.
Barcelona offers another example. Decades of tourism promotion created a brand centered on Gaudi's architecture, Mediterranean lifestyle, and urban sophistication. Tourists arrived in increasing numbers. Short-term rentals proliferated to accommodate them. Housing costs soared. Working-class residents were displaced from historic neighborhoods. The city that attracted tourists began to dissolve under tourist pressure.
The product framing enables these transformations by treating them as market outcomes rather than social injustices. If tourists want short-term rentals, the market should provide them. If housing prices rise, that reflects supply and demand. Residents who cannot compete are inefficient users of valuable real estate. The moral dimension disappears into market logic.
Places as living systems demands a different analytical framework. Living systems have integrity: they are organized wholes that cannot be decomposed into independent parts without losing essential properties. A forest is not just a collection of trees. A community is not just a collection of individuals. A place is not just a location with amenities. Each is a system with emergent properties that exist only in the relationships among components.
Tourism that treats places as products disrupts these relationships. It pulls out marketable elements and ignores their connections to the whole. It imports visitors who relate to isolated features rather than to the system. It imposes pressures that the system may not be able to absorb. The integrity of the place is not considered because the product framing does not recognize that places have integrity.
What would it mean to treat places as living systems? It would mean beginning with the question: what does this place need to maintain its health and integrity? Rather than asking what tourists want from this place, we would ask what the place can sustain. Rather than maximizing visitation, we would optimize for system health. Tourism would become subordinate to place welfare rather than the reverse.
This reframing has radical implications. Most destination management currently aims to attract visitors, accommodate them, satisfy them, and encourage them to return and recommend. Place-based management would instead ask: how many visitors can this place absorb without degradation? What kinds of visitation are compatible with the place's integrity? How should the burden of hosting be distributed across the system?
Some places might conclude that they can absorb substantial tourism without harm. Others might conclude that any significant tourism threatens their integrity. The answer would depend on the specific place, determined through participatory assessment involving all those whose lives are bound up with the place.
This approach also reconceptualizes the role of tourism professionals. The destination manager becomes not a marketer but a steward. The goal is not competitive advantage but careful tending. The skill set shifts from promotion to protection, from branding to boundary-setting, from maximization to maintenance.
I recognize that this reconceptualization challenges powerful interests. The tourism industry has invested heavily in the product framing because it serves commercial goals. Consultants who sell branding services, platforms that sell bookings, airlines that sell seats: all benefit from treating places as products to be consumed. They will resist reconceptualization.
But the current trajectory is also unsustainable. Places consumed past their limits become unusable. The golden goose, as the cliche has it, is being killed. Even from a purely commercial perspective, the product framing is self-defeating in the long run. It just defers costs to the future while capturing benefits in the present.
The living system framing offers an alternative that is not only more ethical but more durable. Places managed for health and integrity can host visitors indefinitely. Places managed for maximum extraction burn out. The question is whether we can make the transition before the extraction approach has destroyed the places we might have protected.
This chapter has argued that the destination-as-product framing is both analytically wrong and practically harmful. The chapters that follow will develop the alternative: places as subjects of justice, not objects of marketing; communities as sovereigns, not service providers; tourism as a privilege that places may extend, not a right that visitors may claim.