Destination Marketing Trilogy

I. Marketers are not born. They become

It was a long time ago, in 2006. Then a sign came to me, a young and super-ambitious tour operator, creating the glorious name of the OrexCA.com brand day and night.

Than to fight for tourists from the West, now and then plunging into the waters of the scarlet ocean of fierce competition, it is better to find the blue ocean.

An ocean where you can devote yourself to creating new products and quality of service, rather than a competitive squabble.

I then had two adviser angels. Completely different people.

One from Mumbai. Despite the absence of restrictions - religious (Hinduism) and state (India is the world's largest democracy), he was a complete ascetic.

The second from Lahore. Neither Sharia nor strict Pakistani laws forbade him to love life in all its manifestations.

So, in one, these two, completely different advisers, converged clearly.

Michael, they said unanimously, you have to go and take the Indian subcontinent, warm.

And I went. For some reason, they didn’t give me a visa to Pakistan for a long time. I did not wait, and landed on a November 2008 night in Punjabi Amritsar.

But there was a little problem. Despite only 2 hours of flight, no one knew about how good Uzbekistan is. But about how tourists might feel bad there, people immediately imagined as soon as they heard the terrible "camp". They treated them to milk tea and shook their heads in the Indian manner. But no one was sent.

What to do? I asked the advisers. That which is part of the problem, usually part of the solution, sages answered. Clearly, I said, and went to rename the destination.

Yes, you heard right. In our promotional campaign, we replaced the geographical term containing "camp" with another, funny and safe, called Tashkent.

Created several slogans - examples of marketing creativity, based on in-depth study of the target market. Like "Wonderful Tashkent - Europe Just 2 hours away", or "Tashkent - small Moscow with rates of Bangkok". And things went uphill.

Later, distortions began in this market and the Indians began to accept special guys for whom money was more important than the reputation of fame.

We removed the foam from the first wave and went to other markets. But since then, I somehow stopped introducing myself as a tour operator. And he began to feel like a marketer in tourism. I do not care who took how many tourists. I love to hear about how these tourists were attracted. How the tour product was positioned, which audience was selected. What features were used and which entrapments were invented.

The picture shows the cover of a promotional CD for North India.