Authenticating typography in cultural festival brand marks

According to the World Tourism Organization, tourism is one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the world. In the 1950s there were 25 million international tourists. This is expected to grow to 1.4 billion tourists in 2030 with 7.8 trillion (US) dollars spent internationally on tourism related industries and infrastructure each year. Cultural festivals are considered destination brands that have the potential to attract significant tourist numbers. With substantial capital spent on the brand communication of cultural festivals, there is a surprising lack of research addressing the pivotal role that typography performs in cultural festivals brand marks. Due to this, industry practices exponentially outweigh scholarly research with no controlled studies attempting to investigate this area.

Systematically challenging this oversight, this paper argues that typography is an essential, vibrant and nuanced element of cultural festival brand marks. Giving an account of the manifest properties of typography in conjunction with the social and culturally constructed characteristics embedded in its performance and use, I draw on a 3-year latitudinal study of cultural festival brand marks a decade and a half into the 21st century. The influence on consumer perceptions of typography in this context are formed via the consistent use of a specific font in a particular situation; direct interactions with the perpetual qualities of the type and abstract connotations (Childers & Jass, 2002). The authenticity of these properties culminate in either effective or ineffectual brand communication for the cultural festival brand mark. Framed by non-traditional methods of investigating typography within communication design research, a mixed methodology involving content analysis, social research and expert analysis is engaged to identify the pivotal role of typography in the brand marks of cultural festivals contributing to a promising understanding of the area.