Tourism and the geographical imagination

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Abstract
The application of modern marketing techniques involves a significant philosophical commitment to commercial objectives, which put product marketability before development. When these techniques are transferred to the promotion of places, as tourist destinations, adherence to this philosophy raises issues for communities. This paper deconstructs some promotional text from Scotland, as a way of illustrating the singularity of this representation of reality, and suggests that there are tourist ‘ways of seeing’ places that differ from other representations. The fusion of tourist representations and marketing philosophy blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, through the commodification of place imagery. In aggregate this amounts to a geography of the imagination in which places increasingly vie with each other to get on the tourist map.

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