Nations and regions branding at Bloom Consulting

: development of new internal projects and improvement of existing projects

Abstract

This manuscript develops a study performed during a four months internship at Bloom Consulting firm, aiming to build a tourism ranking based on a construction of a composite indicator. This ranking measures the effectiveness of brand strategies used by each of the fifty US States to attract tourism. The final goal relies on comparing Bloom Consulting results with a new ranking, obtained through the application of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology. Additionally, in this thesis, it was also performed a distinct analysis which relies on evaluating the ability of local Tourism Board Organizations (TBOs) to promote tourism according to the level of the budget provided. After a detailed characterization of Bloom Consulting methodology (which ranks the nations based on the aggregation of their ranking performance on five different criteria using pre-specified weights), it was applied a different model based on DEA in order to build a new ranking of US States. Hence, using Bloom Consulting data, distinct scenarios were settled with real or rank values for the five variables and with or without weight constraints. Besides that, this manuscript also contains an analysis of the literature on the construction of nations or regions rankings, including academic studies and rankings build by other consulting firms. The use of DEA allowed a more accurate and less subjective evaluation, where each state is able to optimize its performance score. The choice of applying the real data instead of the rank values has also contributed to a more precise analysis.

Date of Award	8 Mar 2013
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Conceição Portela (Supervisor)