Spinning liabilities into assets in place marketing: Toward a new typology

This study discusses places that choose to turn their negative past occurrences and characteristics into opportunities. The goal of the research was to find which campaign components and marketing initiatives were used by places that elected to use the 'turning a place's liability into an asset' strategy. The findings show that there are two main categories of situations in which marketers tend to use this strategy, both of which contain various sub-categories. The two categories are: (i) situations in which negative past occurrences and events are used as tourism attractions; (ii) situations in which problematic place characteristics that usually hinder tourism are turned into assets to attract a specific target audience. The research used qualitative content analysis of advertisements and news reports.