Business Clustering as a Collaboration Strategy for Small Tourism Businesses Contributing to Regional Destination Branding

Abstract

Effective branding for destinations encourages visitation and ensures the financial stability of regions that rely on tourist expenditure. Literature reveals however, that the destination branding process is not straightforward, particularly in regional destinations of which Australia’s tourism industry is largely comprised. Scholars advocate for collaboration as a solution to enacting destination branding, but, the feasibility and practicality of working together presents many challenges. It is therefore crucial that collaboration is further understood by honing in on the collaborative strategy ‘business clustering’ to effectively unpack collaboration complexities. Business clustering combines the skills, talents and attributes of multiple stakeholders within a geographic region and has proven to be a successful strategy for enhancing destination branding. Surprisingly, past research has only investigated clusters that already exist in a region. Until the present thesis, there was no research that explored how these clusters are created, leaving a gap in academic knowledge and subsequently leaving regions without a cluster unable to reap its benefits. The overarching research question of this thesis seeks to understand how small tourism businesses progress through the steps of cluster formation to contribute to destination branding. This thesis will explore the complexities of collaboration, identifying the role and contribution of stakeholder typologies and stakeholder networks to the contribution of cluster formation. The research adopted a participatory action research (PAR) design to bring together academics and industry to create practical knowledge. The study involved 19 stakeholders from local businesses, the local tourism organization and the local council in the Granite Belt region, the regional tourism organization for South-East Queensland and the state tourism organization in Queensland, Australia. Data collection occurred over 11 phases of enquiry during a two year period, resulting in a 45 file dataset which was thematically analysed by the researcher in Excel and NVIVO. This thesis includes three journal papers. Paper 1 is a systematic narrative literature review that investigates the challenges of destination branding for small tourism businesses in regional areas, by exploring the concepts of collaboration. The findings from this paper emphasised the need for empirical research aimed at trialling how stakeholder collaboration can be implemented effectively from initiation. Papers 2 and 3 are empirical. Paper 2 is the first empirical paper in this domain that forms a tourism business cluster, subsequently reporting on the phases and steps to cluster formation. The cluster enabled participants to contribute to the destination brand in their region through the conceptualisation of an event that celebrates local artisan providers. The event is due to be hosted in the future after experiencing COVID-19 setbacks. Paper 3 provides critical insights into stakeholder typologies and stakeholder networks during the cluster formation process. The paper uncovers the degree to which different stakeholders types are helpful and/or harmful to the cluster formation process and contributes the Stakeholder Helpfulness Continuum (SHC), which depicts helpful and harmful stakeholder actions. It also offers insights into the composition of stakeholder networks pre and post cluster formation and the usefulness of the cluster in enhancing these stakeholder networks. This thesis offers an array of new, significant contributions to theory, to practice and to methodology. Theoretically this thesis offers entirely new insights to the tourism collaboration literature, offering an empirically-tested Total Cluster Formation Framework (TCFF) which delivers insights on forming a business cluster, transferable to other collaboration forms. This thesis also contributes significantly to the stakeholder literature, offering insights to stakeholder typology with the development of the SHC which provides guidance on helpful and harmful stakeholder behaviour as it pertains to collaboration. Practically, this thesis offers guides for industry in creating and achieving effective cluster formation and other types of collaboration. The step-by-step TCFF can be followed by industry to form collaborations and the SHC provides useful insights to managing and understanding different stakeholder types and their behaviours. In terms of the methodological contribution, this thesis provides an insightful expansion of PAR as it is applied in the context of regional tourism as well as offering an expansion of new literature review techniques.