We're coming to that time of year when they start handing out awards. In the case of the Asociación Española de Anunciantes - Spanish Association of Advertisers - they've already dished them out.
The Spanish word "eficacia" can be a touch problematic. It can mean both efficiency and effectiveness. As anyone with any managerial and business experience will know, there is a difference between the two. There can be efficiency in doing things well and in an organised fashion, but the effectiveness doesn't necessarily always follow - the results, and good results at that. Let's just say, for the purpose of the association's awards, that "eficacia" is the happy combination of the two.
The awards bear the title of "Eficacia en Comunicación Comercial". They are the highest professional recognition of advertising achievement in Spain. They are the only awards that focus on the results of advertising communication. Efficient ways meet effective ends.
The gold award for "most innovative strategy" went to a tourism brand - Islas Canarias, the Canary Islands. It picked up other awards - another gold for #StopBlueMonday and a bronze for "La sonrisa del sol", the smile of the sun. Since 2015, the Canary Islands' brand has amassed more awards than any other Spanish tourist brand: over thirty national and international prizes. In the Canaries they clearly know a thing or two about efficiency and effectiveness.
A year ago I highlighted the official website for Canary Islands tourism. Hellocanaryislands, I concluded, was a superb website. Its innovation was matched by its simplicity. Contained within it was an adventure in an almost Disney style. It appealed to children and to adults. The adventure told the story of wonders to be discovered on the various islands. And it did this, moreover, in multiple languages. Not three or four, but fifteen.
Promotur, which is the tourism agency in the Canaries, has been credited by the advertisers association with having developed a tourism brand that is superior to all others. What it doesn't do is carry out one single campaign. A key reason for having gained the award is that over the course of a year there are 250 individual promotional actions, using the same fifteen languages as on the website. The effectiveness lies in the detail - the micro-segmentation of content, targeted at specific market segments. Through innovation and creativity, Promotur is delivering a brand concept which stands out from all the other advertising noise.
While the mechanics of the advertising clearly impressed the 170 or so judges, there is the fact of this brand concept. The Canaries as a single entity are in a sense easier to brand than, say, the Balearics. At a most basic level, just think about it for a moment. The chances are that you refer to the Canaries rather than specific islands, whereas you would be most unlikely to refer to the Balearics. Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and the others have their individual identities and images, yet it is proving and has proved possible to apply a unity. And this unity manifests itself in another way. Messages from the advertising will vary according to the time of year, but the climate in the Canaries offers a consistency to support these messages. The brand is thus seamless.
The contrast with the Balearics is great. The abandonment of attempting to convey a Balearic brand is being further advanced by the transferring of promotional responsibilities to the islands. The need for this was recognised by the previous government. The Balearics are not the Canaries. There simply isn't the same attachment in terms of consumer perception. It's Mallorca which matters, or Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera.
In the Canaries they are enhancing an already enviable brand of all-year tourism by micro-managing the tourism market with messages and images to add ever greater strength to the brand from revealing the diversity that exists on those islands. In the Balearics they are deconstructing a brand through a distancing from what has always sustained the brand, be it individual island or the Balearics as a collective. This deconstruction is based on a brand proposition of shaky attributes, those of a winter that conflicts squarely with the solid foundations of sun and beach.
This is being done, moreover, without coming close to criteria that the advertisers association appreciates about the Canaries. The brand thinking in the Balearics might be chaotic, but it's not as if there is (theoretically) any absence of technological knowhow. Biel Barceló has been celebrating the ParcBit fifteenth anniversary, the technology park once destined to be a centre of tourism technology excellence. So where is it? And where also is the social media "guru", appointed by Barceló as director-general of technology at the ministry of tourism, innovation and research? He's a mystery figure, of whom we know little and even less in terms of results.
The Balearics, we can conclude, will not be invited to the association's 2018 awards.
Showing posts with label Balearic islands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Balearic islands. Show all posts
Saturday, November 04, 2017
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Battlefield: Hotels go on the all-inclusive offensive
There we were thinking that some new model of all-inclusive might be on the horizon, one that embraces bars and restaurants into the system. We might have been thinking this; the tour operators might have been suggesting it. The hotels don't seem in any mood to go along with it. This is the impression formed by statements from heads of hotel associations in Menorca and Ibiza; there has not been a similar statement from Mallorca, only ones that are more veiled in their sympathy with views in other Balearic islands.
The other impression is that the hotels are going on the offensive in defending the all-inclusive offer. Or perhaps this does all tie in with the tour operators' mixed-offer all-inclusive (discussed on 12 March) in that positions are being adopted, with the hotels taking an assertive high ground from which they might be seen as the good guys in admitting outside bars and restaurants into their all-inclusive "club". The tour operators are demanding an increase in all-inclusive while at the same time wanting the so-called "complementary offer" to be a part of it. The hotels, seen as the villain in the all-inclusive piece, seem to want to play hardball.
The picture of bars and restaurants being painted by the hotels is one of complaining and of a failure to do anything to attract tourists. It is the hotels, so the argument goes, that assume all the risk and that make the effort; the complementary offer is being challenged to step up to the plate in attracting tourists. Moreover, the hotels' line is that they have every right to challenge incentives such as happy hours and "menus" (presumably they mean menus del día) offered by bars and restaurants. This challenge comes and has come in the form of all-inclusive.
We seem to be heading to a state of all-out war between the hotels and the complementary sector. The hotels, in addition to all-inclusive, have been moving ever more into the territory once secured by the outside businesses - more entertainment, TV (Sky and football), even Sunday roasts. Entertainment may actually be cut back this summer as a way of reducing costs, but in mostly all other ways the hotels are attacking the complementary offer. This war could be a precursor to some truce or negotiated settlement, e.g. the mixed-offer all-inclusive, but what the hotels are angling at is that it should not be they alone who assume the costs and risks of marketing to get tourists to come in the first place.
The hotels are overstating the case; they are but one aspect of promotion. Nevertheless, they have a point when accusing bars and restaurants of only complaining and apparent inaction. And ever more, the complementary sector is seen as leeching off of the efforts made by the hotels. But this growing antagonism can also be seen as the result of shifting circumstances: economic conditions, stronger competition from other destinations and so on. For years, there was a symbiotic relationship between the two. This has gone or is going. It might only return if the tour operators are genuine in wishing to establish the mixed-offer.
One could accuse the hotels of being disingenuous. They are, together with government, town halls and tour operators, the frontline assault forces in tourism promotion. Clearly they are, and they know it, hence the possible disingenuousness. They are also, generally speaking, far better resourced than businesses in the complementary sector. (It might also be noted that some hotel groups run their own outside restaurants.) Their self-interests are served by co-operation, such as in being parts of local hotel associations which conduct their own marketing, but at least they do engage in co-operation. Does the complementary sector act in a similar way? Self-interest is even more extreme here. Do bars and restaurants band together to push a resort? Well, do they? I'm unaware of this happening. Where co-operation does exist, it tends to be as a means to kick against something - all-inclusives, the latest regulation. Negative rather than positive. And when something comes along which might require some co-operation, such as with the estación náutica concept in Alcúdia, self-interest comes to the fore; what has ever happened to this idea?
The hotels have thrown down the gauntlet. To quote, in translation, from yesterday's "Diario", the president of the Menorcan hoteliers says: "we do not see any effort at any time by the restaurant sector to bring tourists to the Balearics." There is, in all of this, a horrible sense of bitching and bickering as the great edifice of tourism threatens to collapse around the hotels and as all the supply that has risen around them also tumbles and falls. Yet for the hotels to attack the complementary sector is - though they wouldn't admit this - the consequence of their being beholden to the muscle of the tour operators; the reverse of the situation that once used to exist, a situation that used to allow for mutually beneficial co-existence with the complementary sector. The hotels are, therefore, going on a bullying offensive while simultaneously they are being rendered less potent by the masters of the industry - the tour operators. They are hitting out at the weakest link in the whole tourism supply chain, because it suits them to be able to try and cling to a power that is diminishing in a market that has changed fundamentally; they are less the victims of the all-inclusive war initiated by the tour operators than the complementary sector, but they are victims nonetheless, clutching at the spoils of war and abandoning their one-time compatriots in the bars and restaurants. Lines drawn for the battlefield.
QUIZ:
Battlefield. Love is a ... . Great, great song from the 80s. Video that goes from the naff ("you leave this house now...") to the also great.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The other impression is that the hotels are going on the offensive in defending the all-inclusive offer. Or perhaps this does all tie in with the tour operators' mixed-offer all-inclusive (discussed on 12 March) in that positions are being adopted, with the hotels taking an assertive high ground from which they might be seen as the good guys in admitting outside bars and restaurants into their all-inclusive "club". The tour operators are demanding an increase in all-inclusive while at the same time wanting the so-called "complementary offer" to be a part of it. The hotels, seen as the villain in the all-inclusive piece, seem to want to play hardball.
The picture of bars and restaurants being painted by the hotels is one of complaining and of a failure to do anything to attract tourists. It is the hotels, so the argument goes, that assume all the risk and that make the effort; the complementary offer is being challenged to step up to the plate in attracting tourists. Moreover, the hotels' line is that they have every right to challenge incentives such as happy hours and "menus" (presumably they mean menus del día) offered by bars and restaurants. This challenge comes and has come in the form of all-inclusive.
We seem to be heading to a state of all-out war between the hotels and the complementary sector. The hotels, in addition to all-inclusive, have been moving ever more into the territory once secured by the outside businesses - more entertainment, TV (Sky and football), even Sunday roasts. Entertainment may actually be cut back this summer as a way of reducing costs, but in mostly all other ways the hotels are attacking the complementary offer. This war could be a precursor to some truce or negotiated settlement, e.g. the mixed-offer all-inclusive, but what the hotels are angling at is that it should not be they alone who assume the costs and risks of marketing to get tourists to come in the first place.
The hotels are overstating the case; they are but one aspect of promotion. Nevertheless, they have a point when accusing bars and restaurants of only complaining and apparent inaction. And ever more, the complementary sector is seen as leeching off of the efforts made by the hotels. But this growing antagonism can also be seen as the result of shifting circumstances: economic conditions, stronger competition from other destinations and so on. For years, there was a symbiotic relationship between the two. This has gone or is going. It might only return if the tour operators are genuine in wishing to establish the mixed-offer.
One could accuse the hotels of being disingenuous. They are, together with government, town halls and tour operators, the frontline assault forces in tourism promotion. Clearly they are, and they know it, hence the possible disingenuousness. They are also, generally speaking, far better resourced than businesses in the complementary sector. (It might also be noted that some hotel groups run their own outside restaurants.) Their self-interests are served by co-operation, such as in being parts of local hotel associations which conduct their own marketing, but at least they do engage in co-operation. Does the complementary sector act in a similar way? Self-interest is even more extreme here. Do bars and restaurants band together to push a resort? Well, do they? I'm unaware of this happening. Where co-operation does exist, it tends to be as a means to kick against something - all-inclusives, the latest regulation. Negative rather than positive. And when something comes along which might require some co-operation, such as with the estación náutica concept in Alcúdia, self-interest comes to the fore; what has ever happened to this idea?
The hotels have thrown down the gauntlet. To quote, in translation, from yesterday's "Diario", the president of the Menorcan hoteliers says: "we do not see any effort at any time by the restaurant sector to bring tourists to the Balearics." There is, in all of this, a horrible sense of bitching and bickering as the great edifice of tourism threatens to collapse around the hotels and as all the supply that has risen around them also tumbles and falls. Yet for the hotels to attack the complementary sector is - though they wouldn't admit this - the consequence of their being beholden to the muscle of the tour operators; the reverse of the situation that once used to exist, a situation that used to allow for mutually beneficial co-existence with the complementary sector. The hotels are, therefore, going on a bullying offensive while simultaneously they are being rendered less potent by the masters of the industry - the tour operators. They are hitting out at the weakest link in the whole tourism supply chain, because it suits them to be able to try and cling to a power that is diminishing in a market that has changed fundamentally; they are less the victims of the all-inclusive war initiated by the tour operators than the complementary sector, but they are victims nonetheless, clutching at the spoils of war and abandoning their one-time compatriots in the bars and restaurants. Lines drawn for the battlefield.
QUIZ:
Battlefield. Love is a ... . Great, great song from the 80s. Video that goes from the naff ("you leave this house now...") to the also great.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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