'Demarketing' recommended to protect Blue Mountains

Jason Tozer

Ms Kern came to the University of Canberra because of the reputation of its tourism staff Photo: Kimberly Douglas

31 October 2006: The delicate balance between encouraging visitors to the Blue Mountains National Park and protecting this valuable piece of our environment was the subject of a University of Canberra research project.

Tourism student Christine Kern examined 'demarketing': the process of striking this balance, by simultaneously encouraging and managing visitor numbers for her master's thesis.

Ms Kern conducted a case study on the Blue Mountains National Park and applied classic marketing theories to the data collected to study the use of demarketing as a tool to balance environment conservation and tourism demand.

The recommendations of Ms Kern's research include better publicising of regulations relating to visits to the park and of its zoning system, which restricts certain activities to particular areas of the park. She also encouraged "more conscious application of demarketing" to manage visitor demand.

She said demarketing is poorly understood and the limited research on it was one of the reasons for her investigating the concept for her thesis.

Heritage

"With nature-based tourism growing in popularity, the impact of high volumes of visitors to world heritage areas, marine parks and national parks is taking its toll on the environment in some areas," she said.

“A lot of people are not quite sure what demarketing is, it’s not the opposite of marketing but actually a part of it. It involves both discouraging people - totally or temporarily - and redistributing them between seasons, different national parks or different areas of the same national park.

"The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service do a very good job in balancing visitation and conserving the environment and the park values, for example through highlighting to visitors appropriate environmental behaviour in their promotional material.

"However, demarketing measures are still used rather unconsciously as there is no planned demarketing strategy. Therefore I suggested a more conscious application of demarketing."

Ms Kern, who is originally from Germany, first came across the concept of demarketing while completing her bachelor degree in tourism management at the University of Brighton, England.

Location

However, she says she choose to undertake her masters at the University of Canberra because of its tourism lecturers and close proximity to some of Australia’s more famous national parks.

“Part of my decision to study here was because of the recent work of its lecturers,” she said.

“But also there are a lot of interesting national parks in Australia and the location of the University was good for my topic because it allowed me to do a case study on the Blue Mountains, which is a really beautiful area.”