Primary Colours

One of the things which attracts many people to New Zealand is idealism.  Originally set up to be a "Better Britain", we've led the world in a number of areas such as giving women the vote etc.  A side effect of this is that there is quite a residue of socialist thinking in the country, aided by the export of high achievers to countries with better business opportunities.  On the good side, this means we have access to lots of public land for our pastimes which still include hunting, fishing, four wheel driving and so on, despite the best efforts of our lunatic conservation fringe.

But that's not the point of this newsletter - what I want to highlight is the misguided thinking behind some of our tourism marketing.  In the socialist world, production is king.  Oil on the hands and dirt under the fingernails are marks of honour, integrity.  Meanwhile a collar and a tie are seen as suspicious and someone who doesn't 'make something' is deemed as living off the rest of the country.

In the rest of the world, the service industry is welcomed, lauded, applauded.  In New Zealand it is mistrusted and only just tolerated.  We can see this in tourism marketing.  Under the previous regime at Tourism New Zealand, the 'operator' was king - whether it be a kayak, a minibus tour, and lately a Maori show.  There was nowhere on the Tourism New Zealand website for people to engage with our inbound community, and a reluctance from TNZ to engage with that community as they didn't really understand or trust us.

I am hopeful that the new management and staff at TNZ are now addresing this massive blind spot, and have been comforted by my interaction with them to date.  But just to keep the message alive I thought I would put it in simple terms.

A carrot is a carrot, good, honest, can be relied upon in terms of general shape and colour.  Think of that in the same terms as a kayak operator.  People can go on the TNZ website and buy a carrot which has been endorsed.  However, luxury tourists or tourists after depth often don't have the time to go online and buy a carrot from one place, onions from another, and search for a bay leaf which doesn't exist.  Enter that most radical of concepts "the chef"!  It is the chef's job to take all sorts of ingredients to put together in a way which works and which delights each individual consumer.  Think of the chef as the inbounder. 

I look around the world and see chefs understood and respected and think to myself that it won't be too long before people finally understand the work of an inbounder.  At our end of the market (custom), this is a real-time three-dimensional exercise across time zones and bearing in mind limited availability in order to come up with exactly the right concoction for each client, often within 24 hours of initial contact.  And in our spare time we push the country in places where TNZ's message doesn't get to (we've run countless education missions into Russia and South America), and do our best to stay abreast of all the new ingredients available to us each year.

Luxury travellers will not buy a carrot, but they will be attracted by a well conceived, intelligent and interesting meal.

post a comment