Co-Creating the Christmas Story: Digitalizing as a Shared Resource for a Shared Brand

Digitalization can be regarded as a megatrend which results that both brand building and brand management
must adapt to new challenges. The growing role of digitizing points to both challenges and risks,
as well as to opportunities. This chapter conceptualizes digitizing as a resource for brand development
with the help of two tourism destinations. It focuses on the role Web-based platforms play in destination
brand development, using the examples of two seemingly nearly similar Christmas tourism destinations
as case studies: Santa Claus, Indiana, and Santa Claus Village, Rovaniemi. The chapter highlights the
contribution of a customer-oriented digitalization to creating a competitive advantage, even a sustainable
one, for tourism destinations with theoretical connections to a resource-based view (RBV) and discusses
its potential for incremental and radical innovative brand development processes.