Archive for June, 2007

The purpose of branding is to add value to your bottom line. A strong brand lets you differentiate your offering from others, it lets you charge a premium for your service, and it builds customer loyalty. Julian Moore, who looks after New Zealand’s brand for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, says his wife is skeptical about the importance of brands. He quipped that next time he was travelling, he’d bring her back some perfume from Poland: aah, the romance of Warsaw. So he’s got a point about the power of country brands!

This blog has been posting about cultural tourism in the last couple of weeks, and while on the subject, it’s worth checking out the country brand index by FutureBrand, a global brand consultancy. They’ve ranked country brands (based on research, expert opinions and relevant statistics):

1. Australia
2. USA
3. Italy
4. France
5. Greece
6. UK
7. Spain
8. New Zealand
9. Maldives
10. India

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Following on from booked-out workshops earlier this year, Vicki Allpress (Marketing Manager at the NBR New Zealand Opera) has published an excellent article on effective e-marketing. It features examples and ideas taken from our very own cultural organisations.

Vicki says e-marketing involves using communications technologies, such as email newsletters (see an earlier post on this blog about these), social networking websites, RSS, blogs and podcasts, to reach audiences.

Which channels you use, what content you provide, how you segment your audience and when you contact them all depends on what you are trying to achieve with your marketing endeavours. Vicki encourages a strategic approach to e-marketing:

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The first day of the Maori Tourism Conference was devoted to the subject of creating quality tourism experiences. Craig Wilson from Quality Tourism Development presented, with breaks for groups to apply the ideas to their own businesses.

What do our visitors want?

Research shows that around 70% of a visitor’s overall satisfaction comes from what they do - not where they stay and how they get around (although a bad accommodation or transport experience can undermine their satisfaction).

So what is quality, and what is a quality experience? ‘Quality’ is in the eyes of the customer or - as Fiona Luhrs of TIANZ says - ‘quality is a race without a finish line’ as customers’ expectations continually increase.

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Creative New Zealand is bringing Alan Brown to Auckland and Wellington to present two sessions on how to articulate the value of arts activities and sell the benefits of attending and participating in the arts.

Session one: The architecture of value

• Cost: free
• Executive briefing for arts administrators, artistic directors, board members and artists.
• What value does your organisation create for its consitutents and stakeholders? Is value an unknowable by product of participation, or a guiding principle behind programming choices? Alan Brown will present a framework for understanding the value system surrounding arts activities, drawing on a variety of studies exploring the intrinsic and instrumental benefits of the arts.

Session two: Communicating value in today’s cultural marketplace

• Cost: $50 (GST excl) per person
• Workshop for marketing and fundraising practitioners.
• As arts marketers and fundraisers gain sophistication about ’selling the intangibles’ of arts experiences, we need better language and a new framework for talking about value. This session is particularly relevant to marketing and fundraising people and will conclude with a group discussion about values-based messaging and examples of different approaches to messaging to audience segments based on their attitudes, values and motivation for attending.

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I’ve just attended the Maori Tourism Conference in Taupo. What a great vibe at this conference, with plenty of evidence of entrepreneurial activities taking place all around the country. I’ll probably put up a couple of posts on different topics, but first …

Kylie Ruwhiu-Karawana from Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) talked about international markets and the opportunities for Maori tourism. Trends in tourism include:

• low-cost airlines are making short regional breaks increasingly popular (meaning travelers are less inclined to make the long haul flight to NZ - however, this development is good for visitors from Australia)
• travelers are looking for experiences, not just destinations
• other markets are now promoting their environment to the global marketplace, using marketing techniques similar to ours – some of these destinations are closer to travelers than we are
• the internet is a great information gathering and booking tool – we have to become more web savvy to compete with other markets using this channel.

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