Facets Of The Marketing Communication For Promoting The Romanian Industrial Cultural Heritage

In recent years, cultural heritage has been extensively considered by both marketing scientists and practitioners as an important resource capable to support the sustainable development of the local communities. Its diversified content, properly capitalized, can fuel the overall efforts made by the heritage owners and managers to develop their communities in economic, social, and environmental terms. Marketing communication plays a vital role in these endeavors by drawing attention, generating interest, stimulating desire, and determining the action of the consumers in relation to the cultural heritage.Industrial cultural heritage represents a segment in full ascent expanding as former factories and plants are decommissioned and join the older buildings, equipment, and technologies having already a historical value. The former centrally planned economies from Central and Eastern Europe, including Romania, are in the situation to manage what was called „a pile of scrap metal" by transforming it into a resource to be employed and capitalized as industrial cultural heritage. The paper aims to explore the extent to which this industrial cultural heritage may represent an attraction for the Romanian tourists and to identify how an appropriate marketing communication conducted under the particular context generated by the pandemics could transform it into a cultural tourism asset based on the results of a quantitative approach.