Event Management

The Commonwealth Games in Melbourne was held from 15 to 26 March 2006, it was the largest multi-nation sporting event of that year in Australia, 71 countries and 4500 athletes participated in total of 26 sports and 24 disciplines over 10 days of period (Lockstone, 2008). Melbourne is the second largest city in Australia, and it’s the capital city of Victoria, known as the city of fashion, gastronomy, greening, entertainment and sports event. Melbourne has named the world’s most livable city by Population Action International 10 times during 1990 to 2006 (Buxton, 2007). Melbourne has these good images is because the right marketing strategies used to promote the city and the most successful marketing strategy used in Melbourne is the event strategy. This essay provides a secondary analysis of how marketing strategies leading the 2006 Commonwealth Games achieve success and impact to the event destination, Melbourne. By marketing of a destination through events can promote the city and attract more tourists from domestic and international. There are three options to marketing the destination by using events to create an attractive image of the city (Frost, 2011). These three options are reinforcement, repackaging and reimagining. Reinforcement is using an already existing image of the destination in events, in this way this image will be reinforced or strengthened in tourists’ mind also can amongst potential travelers (Frost, 2011). 2008 Beijing Olympic Games was used the existing tourism images in the event. Great wall and Tiananmen Square these two iconic buildings were used as symbols for the Olympic (Frost, 2011). Repackaging is events used to enhance or highlight the images of the destination, but these images are not well known by tourists, after the repackaging these places might become well-known places and attract tourist to visit, for example, The Formula 1 Grand Prix is race at night in Singapore, this create opportunity for Singapore to link the event to