Andy Walker
Managing Director, adplus communications
My view is that any organisation marketing a region needs to find the true difference that the region has to offer and drive that a hundred miles deep … and do so in a unique way.
Most region promotions are paper thin in that they take a theme – The feel of real New Zealand, Well worth the journey, Full of surprises, etc – put up a few flags, change the region’s entry and exit signs, and call that a region campaign. Two years later, those signs disappear and others appear.
It’s a constant mistake. There’s something very relevant and unique about every region. Not enough is done to ‘mine’ what that truly is; then often the articulation of it is superficial, as I allude to above.
In other words, people don’t truly understand regional marketing.
The other thing is that it’s not a quick fix … people expect it to be a silver bullet and it isn’t. It takes time. You take the Napier Life Campaign that we have been running for over 15 years, I think. It’s taken time to grow and we have evolved it as we have gone, but now it has become a very integral part of the Napier community.