Branding Zimbabwe Through Tourism and Events: A Systematic Review

Despite the burgeoning academic discourse on destination branding, the literature remains partial to developed nation contexts. Event tourism is argued to be a key imperative for destination brand development as a result of the socio-economic benefits attached to event related travel and tourism spending. Such benefits are particularly significant for developing destinations with emerging economies. While there is an increase in developing nations hosting events, including international sport and festival events, the impacts of such events for these destination brands remains under researched and unreported. This study therefore aimed to address these knowledge gaps for Zimbabwe as a tourist destination and a host destination to a series of annual events and festivals. Zimbabwe hosts annual (tourism) events such as the Victoria Falls festival and the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF), thus positively attracting global attention and international visits in the country and in Africa. Due to the trivial empirical research on this developing nation’s brand, this paper sets out a systematic review of research published about the event tourism industry in Zimbabwe over the last 10 years to conceptualise the discourse on the development of the Zimbabwe brand for tourism development. Academic publications from 2012 to 2022 were sourced from various peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and reports to establish prevalent themes in tourism research in Zimbabwe (n=46). Atlas ti. was used to code and theme the key findings of these articles. These themes were designed to understand the influence of events tourism on emerging destinations such as Zimbabwe. The recommendations of this paper are set out to guide stakeholders at various levels of government (institutional) and private (industry) on the potential for event tourism. Moreover, this study implicates existing tourism policies into the key opportunities for Zimbabwe’s destination brand development. The unique constructs of Zimbabwe’s brand further add to extant knowledge of destination branding.