MASTER THESIS Branding Romania through food tourism Student: Cristina Kovacs & Robert Catanescu Supervisor: Tina Jørgensen Master Programme in Tourism Aalborg University May 2016 TABLE OF CONTENT Abstract 1. Introduction 4 1.1 Structure of the thesis 6 2. Tourism in Romania 6 2.1 General information about Romania as a tourist destination 6 2.2 National branding of Romania 8 2.3 Romanian traditional food 10 2.4 What is traditional food? 12 3. Methodology 14 3.1 Philosophy of science 17 3.2. Research foundation and design 17 3.3 Exploratory research 17 3.4 Inductive research 18 3.5 Research technics 18 3.5.1 Primary research 18 3.5.2 Secondary research 19 3.6 Mixed research methods 19 3.6.1 Quantitative data collection 20 3.6.2 Qualitative data collection 22 3.7 Research ethics 22 3.8 Research analysis 23 3.9 Validity and reliability of the data collection 23 3.10 Methodology limitations 24 4. Literature review 25 4.1 Food tourism 25 4.1.1 What is food tourism? 26 4.1.2 Food tourism dimensions 27 4.1.2.1 Neophilia and neophobia 28 4.1.2.2 Symbolic versus obligatory 29 4.1.2.3 Food as a sustaining or peak experience 29 4.1.3 Tourism culinary establishments 30 4.1.3.1 The importance of food establishments 31 4.1.4 Types of food tourists 32 4.2 Tourist behavior 33 4.2.1 Models of tourist behavior 35 4.2.1.1 Three component attitude model 35 4.2.1.2 Adapted model of food tourism behavior 36 4.2.1.3 Consumer behavior in relation to food 37 4.2.1.4 Tourist behavior model 39 4.3 Motivation 40 2 4.3.1 Push and pull theory 43 4.4 Branding 44 4.4.1 Destination image 45 4.4.2 The country image 46 4.4.3 Image formation process 48 4.4.3.1 Organic and induced images 49 4.4.4 Branding through food tourism 50 5. Analysis and discussion 52 5.1 Romanian traditional food seen as an extra value for enhancing tourists’ experiences 53 5.2 Romanian traditional food should be more appealing 57 5.3 The image of Romania influences Danes’ decisions to travel 59 5.4 Lack of knowledge about Romania as a tourist destination on the Danish market 64 5.5 Cheap is attractive 68 5.5.1 The influence of being a cheap destination on tourist behavior 69 5.5.2 Romania perceived as a cheap destination 70 5.6 Danes are neophilic foodies 71 5.7 Conclusions to the Analysis and discussion chapter 73 6. Conclusions 74 References Annex 3 ABSTRACT Food tourism has known a continuous development in both the eyes of stakeholders and tourists, in the recent years. Thus it is now at a level where there are clear examples of destinations that brand themselves through food tourism, using food tourism as strategy to develop the regional tourism and increase the number of the tourists. However, there are also destinations that have not begun using food tourism as a branding strategy. One such example is Romania, which although has received good feedback for its food, its destination branding strategy does not include Romanian traditional food. The authors of the present research believe that the traditional food can help Romania attract more tourists, especially those who come from countries with good rename in food consumption and tourism, like Denmark. Denmark has developed in the last years a food culture by revolutionizing its cuisine, but also a travel culture where Danes travel often as it resulted from our empirical data. Looking into Romanian inbound statistics in the last years, we have observed that the number of Danish tourists in Romania has not registered a growth tendency, but instead tends to remain somewhere at the same levels, being surpassed by other countries in the statistics. This aspect caught our interest and therefore, in this thesis, we have focused on the following research question: How would branding Romania through food tourism influence the Danish tourists to visit the destination? In finding an answer to our research question, there were used both questionnaires and interviews with Danes; there were 230 questionnaires and six interviewees. The findings of the empirical data were analyzed and discussed with the help of literature review on food tourism, branding and tourist behavior. Based on the analysis, the answer to the main research question of this project is that Romanian traditional food is not yet a strong trigger to be used as a branding strategy for attracting more Danish tourists to Romania. This is due to the fact that Romania does not have a destination image engraved in the minds of Danes. But if that will change and Danes will be more aware of the possibility to travel to Romania. However, even in that situation the food would still not be the attraction that the Danes will want to discover first. Food is though considered as a enhancement of their experience, thus the Romanian traditional food might play an important role in strengthening the Romanian tourism and improve the experiences Danes might have in Romania. The participants in both questionnaire and interviews suggested that food can be an add-on to other attractions Romania has to offer to tourists, such as: nature, history and culture. Moreover, Danes consider the Romanian traditional food as not being of a high level; a gourmet level that the Danes seem to be used with. Thus it is also implied that if Romania wants to attract Danish tourists through food, the Romanian food has to be upgraded; a modernization that will take the food at another level, offering to the Danish tourists more exciting culinary experiences. From the findings as well, we see that Romania is not a known destination to the Danish market, and one of the reasons resulted from our analysis based on empirical data is related to the country image, which seems to influence tourists behavior in a high degree. Moreover, Romania’s lack of promotion as a tourist destination may also contribute to the reduced number of Danes traveling there. For this to change, Romania has to promote itself intensively on the Danish market in order for the Danes to become aware of its existence and to remember Romania’s destination image more than the country image; and if it is to incorporate the food element in branding strategy, then it is expected that the food should be revolutionized with a modern touch in order to arouse interest and become an important reason for traveling. 4 1. INTRODUCTION Tourism plays an important role in the economies of most of the nations in the world (WTTC, 2015; UNTWO, 2015), especially for its qualities as job generator and one of the main sources of recovering for national economies (Petrescu et al., 2010). The importance of tourism is growing and it impacts societies not only directly but also indirectly (WTTC, 2015). In this context we hear about tourism destinations with a well-developed touristic sector, that works well and attracts many tourists, but there are also destinations with poorer tourism strategies, and with implications in the number of tourists they attract; one example of such destination being Romania. Romania has tried for a long time to find the right strategy to promote itself for the international market as a tourist destination. However, tourism in Romania is still a field that has to improve. Romania’s DMO (Destination Management Organization) have tried so far to make use of a series of universal attractions such as: nature and history for building up branding strategies. Yet, the most well-known Romanian tourist attraction can be considered Dracula and its myth. There have also been other branding strategies, but they remained at the level of ideas. Furthermore, based on the reduced number of international tourists visiting the country, Romania seems to be in a search for new ideas that will help them attract more tourists to the destination. In this context, in the recent years it has started to appear in the scientific literature articles debating the importance of Romanian traditional food for developing tourism in Romania (Florea, 2013; Teodoroiu, 2015). This trend can be based on the recognition of food tourism as an important branch of tourism (Hall et al., 2003), which has led also to more and more academic articles on this subject. Yet, the literature related to food tourism in Romania is scarce, with a few articles on this subject written among others by Teodoroiu (2015), Florea (2013) and Sava and Clesiu (2014). Generally, food has earned a good name within tourism field, having the power to pull tourists to destinations and to foster regional development (Hall et al., 2003; Cohen & Avieli, 2004). Therefore more and more destinations recognize the importance of food, and focus on food as well in their tourism branding strategies. However, Romania has not focused on food tourism yet, although there have been discussions around the importance of the Romanian traditional food in regards to international visitors (Florea, 2013). We know neither why Romanian traditional food has not been used in the tourism branding strategies of the destination, nor why there are not more researches written about this subject. Yet, based on similar example of destinations in Sweden (Tellström, 2015) we believe that developing food tourism in Romania around the Romanian traditional food can help attract more international tourists, and also develop tourism in Romania. This is because Romania has many traditional products; beside these products there are also the cooking methods, old customs transmitted throughout many generations, aspects that can be a competitive advantage for Romania as a food tourism destination.