Placing the Market and Marketing Place: Tourist Advertising of the Hawaiian Islands, 1972–92

Abstract

The advertising of tourist destinations plays an important role in the construction of place imagery and in the constitution of social subjects. In other words, destination marketing creates an image of place to be experienced by specific social subjects in particular ways. This is demonstrated through analysis of a series of advertising texts produced by the Hawaii Visitors Bureau and sponsored by the State of Hawai'i in the period 1972–92. The analysis suggests that the ‘target audience’ has changed during this period along with the projected experience of a Hawaiian vacation, but that the theme of alterity, together with its tropes of paradise, marginality, liminality, femininity, and aloha remain persistent elements of the spatializing discourse. These tropes, and their contradictory components, are analyzed, and it is concluded that, in the advertising discourse, Hawai'i as a place and people is mystified into a signifier of alterity.