Meaningful marketing in travel & tourism (part 1)

The Belgian Association for Marketing (BAM) has developed a framework for meaningful marketing. The ultimate goal is to help organisations see how they can make a concrete contribution to a more sustainable society.

I was asked -as marketeer of the year finalist- to use it and improve it based on my experience in place marketing. This was a great assignment, totally in alignment with my personal belief. Moreover, we are actually putting the meaningful marketing into practice at Visit Flanders, and at large via the movement Travel to Tomorrow.

So, this is the perfect occasion for me to share with you 6 Linked-In articles about meaningful marketing in travel & tourism.

Let’s make this fantastic journey together!

Part 1: meaningful marketing in travel & tourism starts with holistic thinking

Holistic thinking implies looking beyond the organization to the broader ecosystem. For me, this is essential for every marketer.

How can a marketer create true added value if you do not see yourself as part of something bigger? How can you act if you are not aware of how you have an effect on others?

Are we paying attention to the ways our worldview and value system shape what we see, what we do and how we define success? And if the world or our values change, what does this mean for us?

Let’s be honest. It’s not so difficult to be successful as a place marketer if you define success as we have done travel & tourism in the last decades as: in numbers of growth: in visitors, expenditures, jobs, contribution to the GDP and, of course, a growth in all indicators that contribute to this growth, such as brand recognition, sentiment, engagement, NPS-scores

With global growth figures averaging from 4% to 6% per year, travel & tourism has become one of the fastest growing industries in the world. And if you are lucky to have a good team that manages to set up good marketing activities you can easily go beyond that average. In Flanders we noted +10% last year.

And of course, this growth is good and brings value. The focus on the economic benefits of tourism has meant that place marketers have long had a marketing mandate, seeking ways to bring in even more visitors. But in the world today we are facing the limits of growth and this will have an impact on all human activity, including tourism & travel. It’s not only climate change that shows us the effect of our current behaviour, but also structural changes in a globalized economy will impact ‘demand’. As the world becomes -in general- wealthier, more and more people are willing to consume and travel. More demand, more products, more selling, more visitors. More success?

A question for every marketer to be answered. In tourism it is not only external factors. In tourism we also need to dare to face the perverse effect of our own success. We cannot ignore the fact that we have created a lot of environmental and social costs with our global and local supply chains, logistics and footprint.

A ship arrives daily in Venice with 2500 to 3000 passengers. What were we thinking when we attracted all these to this beautiful heritage city? What is the effect on the city? Has this made the people living in Venice really better off? Is this the kind of value that we want to offer to tourist?

The job of a marketer gets much more difficult if you start asking questions about this kind of growth. Does it make us better? This is not an easy question to pose nor to answer, because we live in a growth-based economy.

And immersed this post-industrialised view we have been acting more like machines than as human beings. We have been operating like an assembly line, trying to get as many people on and off board as possible. More productivity, higher profitability. We have even adapted our language to the post-industrialised era: from guest to from host to supplier, from place to product, from experiences to packages….

From an ethical point of view, you can even question if we have dehumanised tourism & travel, by trying to make it more efficient and making it faster. It’s like we have seem to have forgotten that tourism really about a human encounter between a host and a guest.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust.

It’s clear we cannot continue like this. We have arrived at a point of awareness that we need to look at the net benefits that we are generating. The ecosystem of tourism is not a machine, it's a living system. All parts are interdependent.

Continue to grow like we are doing 'our business as usual' is no longer an option.

So, it’s time for (place) marketers to really start working towards a better world, and while we continue to focus on economic wealth, we can also contribute to the other 3 W’s: environmental wellness, social wellbeing and human wisdom. 

Now -and here I get really excited- tourism as product or brand is definitely capable reaching the goals associated with the 4W’s! By doing this, will not only be satisfying the needs of our customers and reach the organisation’s goal, we will create true value for and our society by creating a better world. This is not a utopia. It’s the only way forward.

What I like the most about the above model is that it actually is created like a growth curve, while it goes beyond growth as we normally speak about growth. If we define success as growth in more than just economic wealth, we will not only grow, but we will flourish.

In my language we say: a shift from GROEIEN (growing) to BLOEIEN (flourishing).

Sustainability does not go far enough

A very easy example is the question you get in a hotel to use your towel twice to the offer you get from an airline to offset your carbon use. But also from the positive have a lot of good examples where you help children or people in need when buying your trip.

 It’s time to repurpose (place) marketing.

This brings us to the most important part of the meaningful marketing framework: the higher purpose – part 2.