The Marketing Apprentice
At last week’s excellent Marketing Society conference in Edinburgh, four teams of school pupils stood up in front of Scotland’s marketing industry to pitch the tourism marketing campaigns they had developed in response to a brief from VisitScotland.
Scotland’s tourism marketing body is not currently actively targeting the under 25s, so the brief the four teams were given was to develop a campaign (including a radio ad) that specifically targeted at the 16 – 20 age group – a market the pupils themselves fell into.
Their pitches included campaign strategy, media spend and creative treatments, including a radio ad recorded with Radio Forth – and most significantly, the rationale behind their thinking.
The creative standard of the teams was excellent, but it was access to the rationale behind their strategy that was most fascinating and that can offer useful lessons for tourism marketers of any age.
The key insights:
- One website doesn’t fit all – this age group simply did not see an “old style” website as being relevant to or remotely aimed at them. Every team stated the VisitScotland.com site was not appropriate to them. They wanted content on Bebo, Facebook or MySpace and suggested a custom site for the campaign featuring music downloads, interactivity and bright colours.This backs up research findings that young web users are significantly more likely to use online social media than traditional page based websites. (For more on this, see our Introduction to Online Social Networks report).
- The product is strong – this age group saw Scotland’s live music, arts, festivals and activities as a very strong product. The urban had significantly more pull than the rural, however, the RockNess festival – just 2 years old – was cited alongside T In The Park and the Edinburgh International Film Festival as major draws for this age group.
- Public transportation is critical – train and bus/coach access are critical for this age group, who do not typically have access to cars or hire vehicles (another reason the cities held most appeal to them). They acknowledged they were “not part of the Easyjet generation” and that the industry must take account of easy, cost-effective public transport if it serious in targeting them.
- Two markets – as one team rightly pointed out the 16 – 20 market is really two separate markets, the under and over 18s. Clearly the messaging and associated product offerings to the two age groups have to vary and this came through in the creative treatments presented. One team was particularly strong in messages relevant to the 16 and 17 year old market interested in enjoying their first holiday without parents.
- Music and texting – music, downloads, dvd/iTune incentives and SMS based response mechanisms (eg text to register) are seen as the way to this age group’s heart. These were also seen as the appropriate tools for member get member/referral marketing activity.
- Avoid requests for postal addresses – interestingly, while this age group were happy to respond by email and text and would happily provide email addresses and mobile phone numbers – they viewed supplying a postal address as an unacceptable requirement. Whereas older age groups will supply addresses first and mobile phone numbers last, for this age group it seems the reverse is true.
- And it’s logical when you think about it – this group may be in student accommodation or living with parents and postal communication is not as private, instant or accessible to them as SMS messaging. However, there also seemed to be an environmental aspect to the thinking – the young people did not want to see wasteful printed material being sent out, when it was not their preferred route of communication.
- A learning to take from from this has to be the targeting of the personal information request fields to the market in question, always with consideration to the minimum data-capture that will suffice at the first stage of contact. And particularly when targeting a younger age group, consider if you really need an address field completed (and if you do, explain the reasons).
I agree with Helen Campbell of VisitScotland who set the brief to the teams, when she described their performance at the pitch as “insightful, enjoyable and entertaining”.
These young people and their peers may not be Scotland’s target market today, but they will be very soon and as an industry we will need to be ready to communicate with them on their terms - their presentations provided very useful insight to this.
Here’s to more Marketing Apprentice
I very much hope the Marketing Society will repeat this process next year and that other agencies and the tourism and research industries will also consider engaging with schools much more closely.
As Graeme Easton of Edinburgh Council explained, “We’re trying to make closer links between work and education - as a society we’ve got to take responsibility for making those links. Now these kids, many of them studying media and business practice, can see a job here - they’ve been given a chance to see these kinds of jobs exist”.
Businesses can’t afford to imagine the learning in projects like this is one way only - because if the teams last week are anything to go by, these young marketing apprentices have an awful lot to teach us too.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Destination research, Online customer behaviour, Tourism market research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.