MARKETING RESEARCH:
It’s all about getting into your customer’s heads and hearts-- and producing more business for your destination.

Light years ago, during my undergraduate days, I had a professor who shared a simple piece of advice that I’ve never forgotten.

When people would pontificate and make boisterous, grand statements to support their positions or arguments, he would simply ask, “How do you know?” In most cases, they’d hem and haw-- and he’d again politely respond by saying, “yes, but again, how do you know"?

The “Know” or knowledge is what good marketing research should tell us: how to determine your customer’s interests and needs, and then apply strategies that best fulfill your mission. Gleaning that information from your potential consumers provides a pathway to their predictive behavior, so to speak. But marketing research shouldn’t just tell us what we need to know, but also how to deliver an actionable response for success to make this information work for us.

For starters, we need these answers:

• Do we enjoy high, positive destination awareness?
• Are we you delivering the right messages to motivate travelers?
• What are our destination’s perceived weaknesses and how can we best overcome them?
• What visitor markets produce the highest economic impacts for my community?

What is the profile of your visitor?

A visitor profile is a necessary first step in delivering new customers. It helps set strategy for all marketing efforts, including advertising, collateral development, media publicity and so much more.

Some destinations try to deliver this profile using intercept survey instruments at their visitor centers (which will tell you a lot about the profile of those who frequent the center, but are not necessarily projectable to the entire leisure visitor market).

Sometimes hotels offer their leisure market customer profiles to the CVB, which can yield some limited data, such as points of origination.

Others use on-site seasonal surveys throughout the city at attractions, for instance.

A related, and more sophisticated approach is employed by some destinations that track the value of events.

The optimum method—and the most cost effective one as well—employs an internet based email survey instrument that surveys both the visitor and the non visitor.

This is a vast improvement over the old telephone survey method in both time, cost and data delivery. Top clients using this approach include Hong Kong, Disney, Marriott and successful islands of the Caribbean.

You not only get demographic information. You’ll learn what the destination’s and major attraction’s top of mind awareness are.

Dependent on the questionnaire, it will also serve you well as a strengths/weakness analysis.

And the best news is that the data can be turned around in just a couple of weeks.

Brand Positioning and theme line development

Internet based research is also terrific for testing your marketing messages that should best attract consumers. With this Internet research technique, you can quickly ascertain which are the most believable and motivational messages.

That leads you to develop a positioning statement that can best separate your destination from others in the eyes of the consumer.

From the positioning statement, you can then move on to the development and testing of a theme line process, and resulting theme, that helps in your branding efforts.

An alternative to the Internet process is the use of focus group research, which has advantages for probing, and more detailed “peeling of the onion” information, if that’s what you’re looking for.

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There was a time, just short years ago, when some bureaus actually evaluated their success based on the relative market conditions of their destination. If the market performed well, they took credit for much of that success. (Although I don’t recall a corresponding approach when the marketplace tanked).

Today, the CVB is best judged by the work it delivers and the market response it produces in incremental visitations and resulting economic impacts.

So another critical CVB research need is providing the pay-off to the mission statement. In other words, can you clarify in one simple statement, the quantifiable value of what your CVB produces annually? Most, unfortunately, can’t or don’t.

Delivering Bureau Return on Investment (ROI), in terms of positive economic impacts accrued as direct results of your sales, advertising and other relevant programs, has become such an important requisite in valuing the worth of your bureau and its efforts.

Monitoring the marketplace

At the same time, a number of CVBs recognize the need to monitor the health and well being of their marketplace for their members and principal stakeholders.

Some produce a monthly barometer of visitor indicators to measure growth. This may involve a comparative monthly and annual analysis of segments including:

• Room night generation
• Hotel occupancy
  Attractions Attendance
• Information center visitors
• Convention center business, including # of conventions, delegates, etc.
• Restaurant receipts
• Airport arrivals
• Interstate traffic counts

Another technique involves monitoring local destination market share of state and federal tourism impacts (although this information is not always readily available).

The beat goes on: measuring mystery and intimacy as brand attributes.

Just look around. New research techniques and methodologies to guide success are emerging daily.

For example, “Fast Company Magazine” reports that some clever marketers have now figured out how to measure your real feelings about your latte, your sneakers, and your breakfast cereal (will destinations be next?).

While marketers have long measured performance and trust, now they’re measuring mystery, sensuality and intimacy as brand attributes. They are using web based techniques to ask questions about the love of products, rather than respect—and some products such as Nike and Adidas (and “brands” such as “Bill and Hillary”) scored quite high.

This may all seem futuristically farfetched to you, but here’s what Kevin Roberts, author of “Lovemarks: the Future beyond Brands” suggests on why and how you should put love in your brand:

Find your most passionate customers and listen to them. They’ll tell you all about why your brand is a lovemark for them. They’ll write your advertising for you. (Sounds like the wildly successful “Virginia is for Lovers” campaign, which I was fortunate in marketing 35 years ago.)

Put your brand through the love-respect axis. (See an abbreviated version online at www.lovemarks.com) Look at how it scores on mystery, sensuality and intimacy. Make it operate on as many senses as possible.

Start Telling Stories. Quit talking about benefits and performance. Instead, show your brand as part of an experience, an adventure, a myth or a dream. (Here, I part company with this premise; benefits are still the quintessential requirement for successful tourism marketing)

I believe the main point of all this is that there’s an awful lot for us to learn--and research holds the key. Good luck on opening new doors for your future.