Creating the world's most sustainable and attractive travel destination. A content analysis of sustainable place brand identities in Southern Sweden

Abstract: This study examines how the place brand identities of seven Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) in southern Sweden guide their sustainable tourism communication. With the importance of sustainability becoming clear, interest in sustainable place branding is growing rapidly in scholarly and professional contexts. In practice, Sweden aims to become the world's most sustainable travel destination by 2030. Thus, its regions are encouraged to use nudging to promote sustainable tourism, prompting visitors to make sustainable choices to reduce the negative impact. Despite a strong communicative link, place branding research focuses on tourism, business, and politics but lacks consistency with practice. This study examines the communicative aspect of sustainable place branding to reveal any dissonance between region's place brand identities (PBIs)and their sustainable tourism communication. This study conducts a two-stage analysis of textual content from seven DMO websites: Stage 1 quantitatively analyses the PBIs using deductive coding following Taecharungroj’s (2019) Three Pillars of Place Brand Identity framework. Stage 2 qualitatively analyses the sustainable communication utilising inductive and deductive coding based on the Sweden’s Strategy for sustainable tourism and a growing hospitality industry. Stage 1 findings indicated homogenous PBIs with a focus on natural landscapes and outdoor activities, while Stage 2 showed that sustainable tourism communication primarily focuses on environmental sustainability, followed by social and economic sustainability. The study recommends DMOs to use their unique PBIs to guide sustainable strategies, involve visitors in sustainable practices, and emphasise making tourism more sustainable instead of just implementing certain practices, to enrich visitor experience so that Sweden can meet their 2030 goal.