Sep
7
Hawaii’s new tourism strategy
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9
Marsha Wienert, the governor’s tourism liaison and a member of the Hawaii Tourism Authority board, tells me the new thinking about dealing with the tourism crisis is not just about putting visitors into hotel rooms; it’s also about putting visitors into certain airplane seats.
My own simplistic thinking had been this: we need to take action fast that brings more visitors now, not later, and the only way to do that is to target affluent West Coast visitors who already like Hawaii, can still afford to come, and just need to be told, “Come NOW.”
The objective: fill enough hotel rooms that hotels don’t have to lay off a lot of people.
Wienert explained that there needs to be a second objective: fill enough airplane seats that airlines don’t cancel more airlift to the state.
The difference between my one-goal thinking and what she said — which is what all the tourism marketing executives are thinking — is that I would have just bought radio and TV commercials and newspaper ads in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, while their more sophisticated thinking suggests the need for ad campaigns in New York (Continental flies here from Newark), Houston (ditto), Atlanta (Delta), Dallas-Ft. Worth (American), Chicago (American and United), Minneapolis (Northwest) and so forth. The idea is plane-based, not hotel-based — raise the airline’s load factor on that flight so it doesn’t cancel it to save fuel.
It’s smart, practical thinking.
But I do want to stress one point that I think worth considering when allocating ad money on the mainland. Marketers tend to pick the markets they want to target, and then do what they can to win hearts and minds, based on a formulaic assumption that a certain percentage of targeted consumers will respond and the rest won’t. (These are the people who say it’s too late to save the fall or the winter so let’s try to improve next spring.)
There isn’t enough time and there isn’t enough money to keep thinking like that. What would really help would be saturation marketing to raise the percentage of people who act — again, people who (1) can afford it because the downturn hasn’t hurt them personally, and (2) have already decided they like Hawaii and will come back at some point — so the only persuading you need to do is to that there’s never been a better time to vacation in Hawaii than right now so book now.
Marketers often forget that they can raise the percentage of impressions that actually work because they always believe they put together the best of all possible campaigns. I come from the opposite side. In a lifetime of working in broadcasting I have heard some really ineffective commercial campaigns, including some that were ineffective only because they didn’t saturate enough (bought too few commercials) or bought the wrong station.
I encourage our marketers to consider this, not because they’re lame, but because they’re not, and they are likely to come up with some fresh ideas for making a more intense impression that induces more people to act.
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