Understanding the contribution of stakeholder collaboration towards regional destination branding: A systematic narrative literature review

Through a rigorous systematic narrative literature review process, this paper investigates the complexities of destination branding for small tourism businesses in regional areas, revealing the challenges faced by these destinaitons in attracting sustained tourism. In regions comprised of numerous small businesses, complexities arise in destination brandingas each business projects their individual ideas about the destination's brand, creating a diluted marketing message. If businesses were to collaborate for destination branding, the marketing message would no longer be diluted. As such, this literature review explores the concepts of collaboration including strategies for collaboration and stakeholder collaboration, to understand how they can best contribute to successful destination brands. This review synthesizes destination branding literature that focuses on collaboration and how it can contribute to positive destination branding, establishing a basis of current knowledge in this domain and offering new insights and interpretations on collaboration for regional destination branding. This review highlights how useful collaboration has proven to be in regional destination branding, but also reveals how difficult and problematic enacting collaboration can be in practice. A framework is proposed within this paper to explain relationships between the concepts, to be used as a platform to direct future research in this domain.