Paris Syndrome: Sometimes we need to be careful what we wish for When I conducted a long-term brand tracking studies in both the airline industry and for destinations and destination marketing, I noticed that the Japanese consistently rated everything to do with France very positively. For many Japanese people France, and particularly Paris, form an ideal of a destination – representing civilisation, beauty and culture. But when Japanese people visit Paris, some suffer a severe disappointment. Real life Paris is grittier and … [Read more...]
Building Digital Assets For Tourism Businesses And Destinations
The last year (2014) has been a rocky road for those in the industry who have put all their social media eggs in the Facebook basket. Many tourism businesses and destinations saw a dramatic drop in their organic Facebook reach last year. This impacted many. This meant that fans were not seeing posts. Then it became official that this was is a deliberate move as part of Facebook’s revenue-generating strategy by making businesses pay more for fans, exposure to fans, and the opportunity to engage with fans. As a result, less than 4% of fans … [Read more...]
How to Engage with India’s Booming Tech-Savvy Travel Population
One of the great side benefits of participating in Australia Business Week in India earlier this month was the chance for some ‘ethnographic’ observation of this exciting source market. One of the most noticeable observations we have made has been around the Indian market’s tech-savviness.A jointly-published report from the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB (Indian Market Research Bureau) International stated that India was expected to surpass the US as the second largest internet user base globally, behind China, in … [Read more...]
The Traveller Path To Purchase – Dreaming
Parks Canada has just announced that it will be putting Wifi into Canada’s National Parks. This has provoked a flurry of debate. Surely the point of a National Park is to enjoy wilderness and undisturbed by emails or the need to connect? After all, we now recognise Nature Deficit Disorder as a condition and JWT identifies Mindful Living as a key trend.  SHARING SPURS DREAMING But I’m going to disagree - this is a fantastic initiative. Sharing has a strong role in driving conversion across the Path to Purchase. Over the years I’ve worked to … [Read more...]
Digital Marketing For Those Who Don’t Do Digital Marketing
At MyTravelResearch.com we do a lot of stakeholder research – and a lot of industry workshops. One of the things we hear a lot from small tourism businesses is that they hate spending time on marketing (especially digital marketing) when they could be doing ‘real’ work and that customers prefer face-to-face contact rather than digital connection anyway. … [Read more...]