(Originally published inTOURISM)
“The hard numbers will prove how we did in the end,” comments Robin Garrett, president and CEO of the Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership (OTMP). “But I can tell you that, having spent a good part of the summer speaking with operators across the province, we were pleased to see there was a very strong domestic market this summer.”
Garrett would like to believe Ontario’s heavy emphasis on its domestic campaign was a factor. “In some places in the province, it sounds like domestic visitors compensated for any losses seen from the US market. Visits were even surpassing results from previous years, because of the strong domestic market,” she says.
With very aggressive marketing efforts, Garrett believes, Ontario was kept top of mind. “I saw a Conference Board of Canada study recently which showed that Ontarians were feeling much more aware of what there is to see and do in their own province than for our counterparts across Canada,” she notes. “So that was good to hear. It means we made the inroads we wanted to.”
Garrett elaborates further: “The US continues to challenge us, particularly the overnight travel, but we have seen some solid growth in domestic and overseas markets as a whole. There are certain parts of the overseas markets that are stronger than others; this depends on the product offering and the type of consumer being sought.
“Obviously, we want to increase tourism of any kind. However the biggest opportunity and the best return on investment does lie within the group that is coming to stay longer and would be a higher yield customer - somebody who might have higher disposable income and might spend more and stay longer. That certainly would be a better focus area for us.”
The OTMPC has taken concrete steps in that direction, according to Garrett. “We are very excited about our new marketing plan being launched at our summit on October 3rd and 4th in Ottawa. Instead of approaching marketing from a purely geographic basis (identifying our customers by geography), we have instead looked at segmentation research and used sources of research available through the CTC, as well as some of our own work, and examined it in terms of what kinds of experiences interested certain segments of the market. All of the marketing programs we are putting forward for North America (US and domestic) will be based on this consumer segmentation approach.
“Central to this,” Garrett says, “is the belief (already identified by many marketing experts over a number of years) that there is a shift in the way people get information and make their decisions, heavily weighted in the interactive world. That does not hold you to geography; instead you can go after networks of people who are interested in similar kinds of experiences, no matter where they live. By using a heavy emphasis on the interactive channel, we will be launching several different marketing programs to market in that way.”
Robin Garrett explains that we can look forward to more of this kind of approach in overseas markets in the future. “It is not an immediate opportunity for us because we are working predominantly with the in-market, but where we do work with consumers (with the CTC) it is the kind of approach we’d like to go on.”
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