City marketing and convention bureaus value propositions in the post-covid time

City marketing and convention bureaus value propositions in the post-covid timeThe role of convention bureaus across the world is to market destinations and cities.This paper explores destination marketing in the post pandemic time. It focusses on thevalues that convention bureaus, a key actor in the meetings industry, propose topotential visitors. The concept of value propositions (VPs) is commonly regarded as astrategic tool for organizations to communicate what and how they will provide benefitsto clients in their offerings of products or services (Payne, Frow and Eggert 2017, Payneet al. 2020). A value proposition is a central part of the business model. VPs can bethought of in terms of promises made to clients or to market segments in externalcommunication (Grönroos and Voima 2013). This calls for an appropriate packaging andpresentation of the values in the communication of organisations (Payne, et al. 2017).From a strategic perspective, VPs affects the process communicating and deliveringvalues (Lanning 2020). Previous research of VPs within in tourism studies include valueco-creation and co-destruction in tourism services (Assiouras et al. 2022), value andtourist brand loyalty (Bose et al. 2022), tourism stakeholder value-co creation (Carrasco-Farré et al. 2022), value propositions in digitalisation processes (Endres et al. 2020) valuepropositions for community building (Butler and Szromek 2019), power in tourismmarketing (Kannisto 2016) and values in experience design (Tussyadiah 2014). The topicappears however to be understudied from a communication perspective and also withrespect to how unexpected events, such as the pandemic, frame the processes ofcommunicating values. The aim of this paper is to advance the knowledge about valuepropositions socio-cultural dimensions by exploring how benefits for meetings bookersand visitors are discursively constructed. The study will answer three questions: how isvalue proposed in the marketing communication of convention bureaus, and whatprofessional meetings ...