Destination Brands Experienced Through Digital Platforms: A Semiotic Approach for the Interpretation of a Case Study

This paper addresses the role of destination brands’ digital platforms as texts designed to offer tourism experiences. Current audiences are increasingly searching for and interacting with products, services, and places through technological advances such as the Internet, mobile devices, and social media, which amplify or even replace their consumption. Thus, destination brands’ marketing and communication management have had to adapt to achieve and reinforce the desired reputation and perceived image in a digital environment. In that sense, this work begins by presenting a discussion about marketing, branding, tourism, and technologies applied to places and destinations’ strategic communication. From there, it develops an operational proposal for an analysis protocol used in the case study of the Japan destination brand, reading and interpreting the semiotic structures and interactional regimes of its official website and app. This articulation of concepts and its methodological application support the conception of digital platforms as significant objects, managed as audiovisual texts and with strategically organized content that opens or optimizes possibilities of direct relationships between the destination and its audiences. In this way, these platforms’ actual and future relevance for the communicational, technological, and touristic success of the management of places is corroborated even beyond each case’s specific and variable information.