Well, while Vicky was blogging at Tourism Innovation Day, I was doing the hard work out front…
Actually, it wasn’t hard work at all as my role was to interview Malcolm Roughead of VisitScotland about how they use research – the only hard part was making the session sound fresh four times in succession but I think we managed it well! I’d spoken to Malcolm a few times in advance of the event but I found that, even in the sessions, there were new insights coming out and I thought I would use this post to share with you the ones that most struck me.
- As a researcher, you often get excited by the insight that your data is revealing – its the sexy part of the job and the one that you think will most please the client. However, the savvy client is looking at the data from a slightly different perspective – to minimize risk. This reminded me of a similar insight I came across recently – good research enables you to gamble more effectively.
- Malcolm also mentioned the ‘Six ‘i’s’ they use in the research process:
- What’s the Issue?
- What Information do we already have about it? (This stage could reveal that there is no useful data and so new data needs to be collected)
- Does this information contain any Insight – anything we didn’t know already?
- What are the Implications of it? How does this affect our business?
- Implementation – what am I going to change in the business to turn this research into activities?
- What was the Impact? (Essentially this is evaluating what has just happened)
Other interesting conclusions were that customer research doesn’t need to be high-tech in order to be successful – a pen-written record of individual customer characteristics can be as powerful for a small operator in driving repeat business through personalized direct-mail as intense statistical analysis can be for large multinationals.
My feeling from Tourism Innovation Day though is that although research is seen as a necessary activity by tourism operators, I still feel that there is considerable scope to take it forward to the next level and integrate it into smarter sales strategies. I don’t mean by this simply identifying profitable market segments but also issues such as yield management and making points of interaction (such as booking systems) more meaningful or simple for the customer.
Being an interview host, as I say, limits your interaction with the other sessions at the conference. So if you were at TiD and think my thoughts in the last paragraph were actually covered in other sessions, do use the comments section to let me know!
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Conference learnings, Industry interview. 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.