Destination Marketing by States

While the marketing efforts of a number of individual states have been reported in the literature, evidently no previous attempt has been made to analyze the marketingplans of all the states. This article reports on an effort to isolate common and unique marketing approaches across as many states as possible. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia responded to a requestfor their marketingplan (orsimilar materials). Of these 37 responses, 14 were essentially economic impact studies and 18 were marketingplans or "plan-like" materials; five states indicated that no materials were available. Analysis resulted in a list of 150 destination marketing goals, strategies, tactics, activities, and tasks which provide both an indication ofthe scope ofsuch travel/tourism marketing activities and a collection of "thought-starters " for destinations seeking to enhance their marketing efforts. The contribution of travel and tourism to state economies cannot be overstated. In 37 of the 50 states, travel-generated employment ranked first, second or third among private industries in 1987 according to the U.S. Travel Data Center (U.S. Travel Data Center 1988); in 56 % of the states trave