There are changes to the structure of the consortium for tourism promotion in Muro. Big deal, you might think, and you would not be wrong. It may be an old adage of business management that structure leads to strategy, but however Muro wishes to integrate different interests, the key issue is what it all leads to - if anything. At times, one fancies they devote energy to the politicking of structure and insufficient to the purpose of that structure.
I wrote about Muro's promotion back in June (8 June: The Point!). It isn't necessary to go over that ground again, except to say that the impetus for that piece was that there was to be a "marketing makeover", whatever that was meant to be. I am yet to be made aware of any.
The main interest groups in Muro are the town hall and the hotel association for Playa de Muro. But the town hall is a thing of faction. Elements within it are on the side of the hotels in respect of the protracted debate regarding the Son Bosc golf course; others are not. It isn't mutual hostility, but nor is it full harmony. Whether in accord or not, there is a bigger issue, and that has to do with how well the town (and others in Mallorca) can promote itself.
There may be a temptation to think that the holidaymaker is indifferent to exact locations; that he opts for Mallorca and that the resort itself is relatively inconsequential. In some cases this may well be true, but one only has to take a trawl through some holiday websites to appreciate that there is a battle going on between certain resorts and a tourist wish-list that needs satisfying by different destinations and indeed hotels. The resorts are their own niches. Once upon a time, Mallorca could have been characterised as some amorphous mass for the mass and massively uninformed tourist, but not now. Before the internet, the towns, the resorts had little opportunity to send out their own unique messages. They were swallowed up in catch-all adverts for the island, and still are when it comes to television and much print advertising. This style of generic advertising can still work well, or at least appear to do so if the appearance of the actual advert is anything to go by. There is one for Andalusia on the mainland. It is visually striking and supported by a dramatic, flamenco-cool, Café del Mar-ish musical and vocal treatment. But it is still a form of first-base attention and interest grabber. The holidaymaker's next act is not now to head off to the nearest travel agent but to go and surf the internet and identify where precisely he might wish to live the holiday dream of that initial advert.
The towns have their own sites. I referred to these on 29 November. The tourist versions are of questionable value, and yet effort and money is devoted to their promotion. In Pollensa, you will see pollensa.com; in Alcúdia, one of the boats that hacks along the bay has an enormous alcudiamallorca.com name emblazoned on the side; in Playa de Muro, taxis have playademuro.net. Of the three, only Alcúdia's is of any real use. All three are essentially vehicles for selling hotel accommodation, and in the case of Playa de Muro, the site is that of the hotel association. It contains little of value. Indeed its tourism perspective is questionable. Take its blurb about Playa de Muro for instance. It is written for a conference audience and not for the tourist. It boasts 14 hotels with "excellent conference and meeting rooms". If these were so important, why are none of them open in winter? Are there no conferences in winter? One also gets a hint as to what may be a purpose of that golf course, i.e. one to support this largely invisible conference business. The website says that "we are planning" a golf course. Who is the "we" in this instance? It can't be the town hall as it is not a town hall site. They may well believe that they are planning one, but there are those at the town hall as well as GOB, the environmental pressure group, and various pieces of legal interpretation who say otherwise.
Much as the internet has become the first portal of call for the holidaymaker, so it should also be for any town hall with a decent promotional message. But the town halls fail to get any such message across. It falls to the commercial websites to do their job for them. Maybe I should apply for a grant. What the town halls seem to be either unaware of, incapable of or unwilling to engage in is any form of interactivity. Those holidaymakers who go and surf the internet. What is one of the more important things they are looking for? Opinion, recommendations, personal experiences. There may be a potential tyranny of prejudice, subjectivity and misinformation through these, but their influence cannot be overlooked. It is just this sort of service that the commercial sites can offer, and the town halls do not or cannot.
For all that there may be a change in structure, Muro will probably allow the hotels to continue being the standard-bearer for promotion via the internet and providing little in the way of meaningful information. Meanwhile, the town of Muro itself is completely overlooked. It may suffer by comparison of genuine interest with Alcúdia or Pollensa, but that's no reason for it to be ignored. There will doubtless continue to be the odd brochure available at the tourist office, yet there is no satellite office in the remote Alcúdia Pins area for such diffusion. The hotel association will doubtless continue to produce its own neat brochures, but these are after-the-event. More and more, it is promotion before-the-event of the holiday that is demanded, and that means the internet.
Promotion is all well and good, but anyone who knows his marketing will tell you that it is but one aspect of marketing. A concentration on this one aspect blinds the decision-maker, the consortium, whatever to the wider picture, and that is the whole marketing mix of the resort. Alcúdia and Pollensa can do this, or could do, as both have resorts (and old towns) with identifiable characters. Muro and Playa de Muro do not. Promotion fine, but attention has to be paid to the product of Playa de Muro, to its lack of focus and to its indistinctiveness, as is exemplified by the fact that it is so often seen as being part of Alcúdia. One thing the consortium could do immediately is to instruct those websites and tour operators which state that certain hotels are in Alcúdia, when they are not, to get that information right. It would be a start.
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Rolling Stones (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2fhus_rolling-stones-wild-horses-live-aco_music). Today's title - a line from a single by an English artist who was big in the USA; the song was a number one there.
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
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