10 Ways Tourism can Earn the Respect it Deserves

At least since at least the 1960s and including my now-concluded four-decade career, many in travel and tourism have repeatedly whined that this sector of the economy doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Some are individual businesses who just want a pat on the back.  Others feel they need special treatment or shouldn’t have to pay their fair share of making places visitor-worthy.

It can be annoying and proposals rarely seem to go much beyond chest thumping.  Later in this essay I’ll take a stab at some more systemic ideas for how the travel and tourism sector could earn more respect.

But primarily, complainants are referring to the fact that most elected officials and administrators don’t grasp that the function of visitor centric economic and cultural development is to drive tax revenue.

Focus in government is typically only about dividing up the pie with the mistaken view that generating it comes only from a political decision to levy taxes.

The validity of the tourism sector’s concern is often visible when elected officials, often pushed by developers and advocates, are all too eager to drain resources shouldered for that purpose away from tourism promotion for their own uses instead.

These folks are better known as TINOs or “tourism in name only” and identifiable by their siren song of “build it and they will come.”

It is true that worldwide the travel and tourism sector now generates nearly 10% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) including 1 in every 11 jobs.  It is projected by economists that this sector alone will generate 3% of the GDP in America this year.

That’s bigger than the automotive sector, to add perspective, or for that matter agriculture, education and mining too.

Even down to the county-level, visitor-centric economic development generates a similar percentage of GDP in places where it is actively promoted, such as Durham, North Carolina where I live.

Instead of incessantly complaining that officials just don’t get it or care, here are 10 simple behaviors professionals in the travel and tourism sector could adopt to earn the respect it deserves:

Deep Six the widespread misuse of the term “industry.”  Tourism has never been an industry.  It is an economic sector composed by as many as seven very different industries that happen to rely in part or in whole on a common consumer, visitors.  Remember: industry is small, sector is many industries together.

Distinguish demand-driven visitor centric economic and cultural development from more traditional forms of supply-based economic development.  Tourism is on the demand side and truly generates value-added to a community.

Adopt an all for one and one for all approach.  Too often tourism tolerates actions and positions that throw one industry under the bus while protecting those that don’t want to pay their fair share.

Grasp that respect isn’t won or demanded, it is earned, not from tooting your own horn or chest thumping but by patiently and continually explaining how the economy and tax generation works and how travel and tourism is a means for community destination and cultural development

Stop killing the things visitors love.  Avoid cookie-cutter architecture that only homogenizes communities and adopt zero tolerance for use of tools such as long-obsolete roadside billboards that create sign blight (aka litter on a stick,) desecrate scenic vistas and mar sense of place.

Embrace design thinking beginning by performing a “Drano” operation on tourism organizations and models that having achieved their purpose have become obsolete given changes in the tourism ecosystem.  These only serve as a drain on resources and engagement.

Respect and encourage preservation of the unique sense of place in each destination beginning with place-based assets, traits and values.  Encourage communities to differentiate rather than become generic.  Protect them from being hollowed out by mainstream events and mega-facilities.

Root out intra-sector hypocrisy.  Remember that the tourism sector flourishes as a public-private sector partnership.  Discourage public subsidies of mega-events and facilities that will not generate a return on investment to the public treasury.  Refrain from win/lose issues such as forcing restriction of local school calendars.

Take a prominent lead in solutions to societal inequities such as business models based on paying less than a livable wage, vestiges of institutional intolerance and bias as well as gentrification that is insensitive or imbalanced.  Earn a reputation for win/win facilitator.

Encourage widespread adoption of best practices.  Demand that destination marketing organizations earn accreditation.  Cross populate best practices across all industries in the sector including special assessments such as Tourism Improvement Districts or prepared food taxes dedicated to self-funding promotion, wayfinding, cultural landscape and destination clean up and beautification.

It is complicated to form one voice over an entire sector of multiple industries but it can be done and one of the first steps should be to develop a reliable metric.

It all begins by acting like a sector not just an industry.  It is possible only when the sector is as concerned with the overall ecosystem (including the pubic sector) as it is with individual bottom lines.

If these 10 areas are not of interest, just stop whining about respect.

Design Thinking As A Means of Staying Relevant

Some people, when they read a recent post that “design” would be a prominent competency, even for CEOs, for community marketing organizations of the future mistook my comment to mean “graphic” design.

Maybe this is some of my former peers have still not developed in-house capacity for that aspect, even though leading-edge DMOs did  three or four decades ago, not only to be more efficient but to keep better control of the graphical representation of their community’s brand.

But I was actually referring to process design or the capacity to design things like systems, project management, processes, new product launches as well as mothballing those that are obsolete.

This way of viewing design includes the ability to morph or scale organization design, business models and even things such as strategy and especially customer service.

Going forward what is called “design thinking” will be more and more essential to preserving and leveraging a community’s unique sense of place, the primary role of a DMO.

My forecast really wasn’t a reach for anyone keeping up with best practices or readers of excellent books such as Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.

It was penned just as I retired nearly six years ago by former Rotman Dean Tim Brown, the founder of IDEO who blogs at Design Thinking.

But Brown reinforces my belief that you “see into the future by looking back” when he reminds us that design thinking dates at least to the early 1800s when Isambard Kingdom Brunel applied design thinking to transportation systems.

Community marketing is about differentiation at its strategic core and according to Brown, design thinking is essentially about developing divergent approaches to solving problems.

Many organizations often fail because of poor leadership, especially when run by volunteers where leadership positions are passed from one member to another without regard for engagement or leadership ability.

But instead of addressing the lack of engaged leadership, as they lose steam these organizations often but futilely try to fuse with an earlier but obsolete organization.

Rather than closely examine intrinsic factors such as leadership strength or morphing design to address obvious changes in the ecosystem in which they operate, they superficially restructure hoping that fusing two organizations will restoke one while bringing the other back to life.

This doesn’t solve the problem, it instead merely leads to a bigger organization lacking leadership and usually the obsolete organization sinks the still relevant one too and a new organization is formed.

It is how we end up with scores of organizations on life support and draining resources away from those that are relevant.

Examination of this extrinsic vs. intrinsic approach suggests this approach is inevitably doomed to failure.  It definitely not “change by design.”

Organizations, especially when volunteer-driven, just aren’t very good at introspection or design thinking, and nowhere is that truer than when it comes to governing boards, leaving them vulnerable to regressive but well meaning “humpty-dumpty” thinkers.

The annual Stanford survey of nonprofit boards of directors shows that many are in desperate need of redesign, even when executive led.

Too often members are appointed without ensuring they have or are willing to learn critical skills such as leadership.  Even leading an organization of their own is no guarantee that an appointee will be able to lead a volunteer board.

In the current survey, over a quarter say their fellow board members lacked a strong understanding of the organization’s mission and strategy.

A third of the respondents were not satisfied with the board’s ability to evaluate the organization’s performance and over a third said the boards to which they belong never evaluate the board’s effectiveness.

Nearly 7-in-10 organizations have no leadership succession plan let alone require qualifications for leaders and nearly 60% had no benchmarks to measure performance to a peer group of similar organizations.

Only 15% believe their boards stay on top of strategy more than once annually and 41% only do this most essential board role every two years or less.

Half do not believe their fellow board members are very engaged making those that have a “you’re next” form of rotating leadership especially vulnerable to decline.

Nearly 7-in-10 say their boards have faced one or more serious governance-related problems in the past 10 years and 16% say they have extreme difficulty attracting qualified new board members.

The results are worse for those that are volunteer-driven and even more dismal when budgets are around $500,000 give or take.

Racism Metrics Among Americans

Once you read up on research by those who study racism, it is a little annoying when the term is applied too broadly especially as has been common over the past year both to individuals and institutions.

I always felt my father was racist but having come in contact with true racists while turning Durham, North Carolina’s image around in my past professional life, I now realize he wasn’t.

He was born in 1923 just as the first studies were launched to determine attitudes toward various groups among Americans.   Back then Americans readily expressed their racial prejudice.

But before I get into how prevalent racism was back then, let me touch on what was happening in America during my father’s formative years.

In fact, in the review of this research in the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, the authors note that in the 1930s it “may have been as politically incorrect to express tolerance as it is to express intolerance” today.

Keep into mind that even into the 1930s Black Americans were being lynched at an average of fifty to one hundred per year.

Those occurred primarily in the South, but even in my father’s native Pacific Northwest, this was also the heyday of nativism which included a resurgence of groups such as the KKK.

Nativism was an anti-immigrant movement spearheaded by politicians such as Congressman and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, newspaper editor and Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington state as well as Presidents Coolidge and Hoover.

As an aside, Johnson coined the phrase “Keep America American” which was picked up by the Klan.  Coolidge rephrased it as “America must be kept American.”

In fact, a 1930s survey of lodging establishments across the country just as travel and tourism became mainstream found that 90% would not accept Chinese as guests.

Germans and Eastern Europeans were the primary targets of nativism back then but it appears to be essentially the same play book that Republican hopeful Donald Trump’s campaign strategy has resurrected today only targeting Latino immigrants this time.

Today, surveys show that only 10 to 15 percent of Americans harbor explicit prejudice against Black Americans compared to about 60% from the 1930s up through the 1950s.

I suspect there may be the same percentage of blacks who are openly prejudiced toward whites.

But racism or prejudice or should I say acceptance of other groups occurs on a spectrum and there is evidence that 7% of Americans are truly virulent racists.

During the 1990s, the organization I led mounted a grassroots effort that reversed the negativity toward Durham manifest by a majority of those living in nearby communities.

But researchers who were helping us told us not to bother when those who continued to be very negative was reduced to single digits.

From reading verbatims, reports from mystery shops and especially online comments to news stories, it was abundantly clear they fell among those remaining were hard core, virulent racists.

Having always been more diverse, Durham was merely a surrogate for their animosity.

We succeeded in the image turn around by inoculating those who were uncertain and reinforcing those who were positive about Durham while appealing to those who were “milder” negatives with better information.

This is why we were wise not to launch a big ad campaign.  Far too blunt as a marketing tactic, traditional ads merely reinforce existing opinions (positive and negative.)

In the wake of Supreme Court rulings on the unconstitutionality of segregation, by the dawn of the 1960s Americans were gradually becoming much more egalitarian and self-conscious about intolerance.

So by the 1970s scientific surveys to determine prejudice had to become more covert as attitudes toward explicit prejudice changed.

By then my dad was turning 50 was apparently too ingrained to make the shift or maybe he just liked pushing my buttons during during lively debates on visits home.

However, I had noticed growing up that while he seemed explicitly prejudiced toward some groups, at least in rhetoric, he wasn’t at all when it came to individuals.

You often hear something similar voiced by regressive politicians and some celebrities who when caught making insensitive or racist remarks are quick to rationalize that Black people are some of their best friends.

Studies show that 75% of Americans - including some who are Black -have an implicit preference for white vs. black racial groups.  It often results in institutional bias where studies show that even a percentage point or two of discrimination on an individual level can add up to a disadvantage for Black Americans overall.

It is reflected in the analysis of tipping practices where patrons, on average, including those who are Black are found to give higher tips to Caucasian servers.

It is why studies also find that many Americans are favorable to leveling the playing field based on gender but not ethnicity, betraying an implicit bias.

But about 40% of Americans have what researchers call aversive racism, a term coined in the 1980s, which means they avoid interaction with other racial and ethnic groups.

Americans who fall into these groups today probably don’t self-identify as racists.

Nor are police officers using stereotypes to make lightning quick life or death decisions protecting neighborhood where less than 25% of the residents, according to Harvard Sociologist Orlando Patterson are structurally disconnected and/or mimicking a street culture that is often itself racist and misogynist as well as defiant of authority and laws.

This all crossed my mind recently while driving home from a lakeside retreat in the county north of Durham.

I was mulling over how a heavy-set white woman had been loudly pontificating up and down the isles of a Walmart to anyone who would listen characterizing Durham as a cesspool, albeit one which provided her with job when a pickup flew past in the opposite direction.

Speeding north along Dirgie Mine Road through Allensville it was streaming two huge, 4’ x 6’ Confederate flags on each side of the truck’s bed.

Doing a little stereotyping of my own, I wondered if the occupants were just trying to intimidate the fourth of the residents there who are black.

Or maybe they were returning from one of the demonstrations of support for that bygone symbol or maybe they just proud albeit insensitive and shallow good ole Southern boys.

Researchers use the term disassociation to describe how our minds operate at two levels, one automatic and the other reflective.

This is how so many Americans can profess to be egalitarian but their automatic responses are clearly biased.

My dad was very egalitarian but reflecting the norms of his youth also very biased when it came to blacks as a group.  Pushing back against his attitudes while growing up I’m sure played a role in propelling me to be much more tolerant and accepting of other groups.

But wondering if I also absorbed an implicit bias when it comes to race, during my summer hiatus from these posts I took the test related to race at Project Implicit.

It was devised in the late 1990s by researchers at the University of Washington, Harvard and the University of Virginia including the two authors of Blindspot, which I also highly recommend.

The test is ingenious for many reasons including that test-takers can’t “game it.”  I suspect that may be because it also measures hesitation.

There are also tests to measure implicit biases based on age, gender, sexuality, weight and religion to name a few.

I turned out to be neutral when it comes to race.  In other words, I am not biased toward or against others on the basis of race.  I have yet to take the other tests but I suspect I may be implicitly biased on the issue of weight.

Take it for yourself, regardless of your ethnicity and especially if you feel or get the impression from others that you may be racist, even somewhat.

It should be require of elected officials seeking to undermine voter rights.  

Small Business and The Golden Age of Geomarketing

A new survey of small and medium sized business advertisers (SMBs) across the nation by Borrell includes a list of “paid” media they favor for those who still use that element of marketing.

It helps to understand that 72% of these SMBs have fewer than 50 employees and 48% have fewer than 10.  Nearly three-out-of-four are independently owned.

The paid media they favor, in this order, are digital, newspapers, local magazines, direct mail and radio.  Mobile falls sixth.

If you throw in all outdoor advertising including buses and kiosks, only 17% still bother with billboards which along roadsides are viewed as blight by 8-out-of-10 Americans.

Taking only true small businesses into account, another report shows that only 3% of small businesses now use billboards confirming they can do the math of the turn-off-to-turn-on ratio.

More than 80% of SMBs have established their own media channels in the form of a website and social media page.

Interestingly, the analysis found that 72% are now spending far more on digital services to support their websites and social media pages than they do on basic or traditional advertising.

Borrell concludes that we are at the “end of the Golden Age of Advertising” and witnessing “the dawn of the Golden Age of Geomarketing.”

According to the report, local digital marketing is responsible now for virtually all of the growth in local advertising.  Borrell defines local ad spending as dollars spent within the market to reach people within the market.

But geomarketing is now getting far more specific than the huge, sprawling, multi-county media markets devised by traditional media to optimize what they could charge advertisers by hoodwinking them into believing that consumers would commute hours away for what they could easily buy local in the truly local sense.

That’s what makes the findings of the report even more relevant.  That’s because geomarketing puts the local back in local, meaning the local business climate.

In 2013, Borrell forecast the zoom in online advertising with traditional media rather stable.  But the company’s 2015 survey reveals an even more rapid transition to online.

In reality, longitudinal research at USC’s Marshall School of Business pinpointed that this paradigm began to shift three decades ago and by 2010 , traditional advertising for businesses overall had reached a negative return on investment.

It is clear from many who analyze this rapid decline that the advent of digital and the Internet didn’t kill advertising greedy advertisers and traditional advertising mediums did.

Advertising as an element of marketing is essentially a form of “yelling” for attention.  Yelling annoys consumers even when they are viewed as entertainment or diversion as they are by 77% of viewers during the Super Bowl.

Ads during the game have a substantial turn-off ratio among viewers.  According to post game surveys, nearly 4 people were turned off by the ads during the 2015 event for every one who was influenced to actually buy something.

FYI, turned-off includes those who were bothered or viewed them as interrupting the game or making it last too long or felt the advertisers should have saved their money and passed the savings along to consumers instead.

Even if only awareness generated by the advertisers is measured, the turn-of-to-turn-on ratio barely reaches break even, hardly a metric worth shelling out $4.5 million for a 30-second spot.

Many “yup yup yup uh huh uh huh” marketers fail to grasp that traditional advertising can actually be counterproductive.  But savvy execs understand this is a fatal flaw, especially when the cost comes to $3 a viewer, double that when netting out those who were annoyed.

But then again, maybe stockholders should view these as an incredibly expensive way to stroke egos.

The shift to digital continues to have so much momentum that analysts at Borrell forecast that traditional media will soon begin to be used, if at all, more like “niche support mechanisms to a digital marketing plan.”

Full research reports and analyses are available from the Borrell website.

Community Marketing In The Future

A business professor-friend of mind recently asked me to write about the long-term outlook for community destination marketing organizations, my four-decade career that ended at the dawn of 2010.

It will be a fun exercise.  Even though these organizations overall have continued to evolve over the last five years, the answer to his query can be found in the past, which is the primary source of all strategic insight.

When I reference this as “looking back to see forward,” I am not talking about the regressive propensity by some of my former DMO peers to react to changes in the tourism ecosystem by futilely trying to put humpty dumpty back together.

It is true, as some pundits predict, that “some” DMOs are already becoming irrelevant but not just because of technological advances.

Communities that have surrendered authenticity and sense of place while opting instead for mainstream mega-events and facilities are already obsolete.

Rather than differentiate, this approach homogenizes identity and character so that sooner rather than later there will be little need for a DMOs in these communities.

Those DMOs in communities that that still have and safeguard a unique sense place woven from distinctive cultural, built and natural place-based assets are and will still be highly relevant far into the future.

But to paraphrase futurist and analyst Brian Solis, in the future the marketing these community destination marketing organizations deploy will have little resemblance to marketing as it has been.

This isn’t and won’t just be about “keeping your knees bent” or better yet balancing for absorption as in the “bump method, aka, mogul skiing” to use metaphors from downhill skiing.

Interestingly, in the book forward to Share This Too, where Solis made that statement about “The future of marketing [having] little to do with marketing,”  he uses a comparison of the difference between surfing and skateboarding with snowboarding.

Describing that while they may look familiar, with the first two you lean back and use your back foot as a rudder.  But with snowboarding, you lean forward.

Change, even when it seems evolutionary requires not only “perseverance” but an “open mind” to doing things differently.

That said, marketing as most DMOs practice it began to rapidly change three decades ago, more than a decade before the Internet was made available commercially and nearly two decades before it was employed by even the most forward thinking DMOs.

While much of what a typical DMO does today will continue to be replaced in the future by technology, you can see what those that will still be relevant will be up to instead by looking at what all but the most strategic DMOs have long been neglecting.

Here is my take on eight (in no particular order) community destination marketing foci there that will always be a need for “boots on the ground” to optimize visitor-centric economic and cultural development even as more traditional elements of marketing continue to be commoditized by new technologies.

Serving as the vigilant conscience and guardian for the distinctive sense of place of a particular destination community – Perpetually justifying the unique value proposition: what’s special, what’s different.

Defending community reputation as a means of lowering barriers to visitation e.g. proactive fact-checking, ensuring accuracy even if troubling, protecting image, challenging negative stereotypes, drilling down to distill and celebrate inherent brand values, traits, positioning.

Conducting intensive and never-ending front line training about the community to optimize visitor satisfaction and circulation as well as training local stakeholders to optimize economic value added by “buying local.”

Leading the process for distilling strategic insight into what McKinsey’s Hugh Courtney identifies as the four levels of uncertainty including the “clear enough” near-term, “alternative futures” or scenarios a little further out, “a range of potential futures” in the distance and finally, patterns of evolution.

Most so-called strategic thinking stops at level one – the obvious.

Creating and curating content/context communications including perpetually freshened graphic imagery that draws attention by providing valuable knowledge and insight as well as appealing to only those visitors for whom the community can deliver on its brand.

Maintaining and providing databases that update GPS data as well as making certain that all stakeholder businesses and organizations have “claimed their online real estate.”  Monitoring search engine optimization for the destination and all stakeholders.

Mining and harvesting data and analytics, including primary research, to inform the leverage of private development capital, calculating location specific economic impact and providing and interpreting destination-specific metrics for all stakeholders.

Analyzing, shaping and articulating the visitor experience as well as advising stakeholders on how it can be improved.  Deeply aggregating, trafficking and providing event data to optimize exposure and limit dislocation as well as cannibalization of underwriting and volunteers.

There are others but no more advertising.  Sales will be more like data mining, performed by data analysis rather than glad-handing.  All media attention will be earned.  Official community websites will be comprehensive and capable of being harvested by intermediaries.

Staffs will be larger because these marketing foci of the future are more labor intensive and require quick reactions.  Skills sets that will be prized are analytics, design and backbone.

In my experience only one DMO in a thousand has made even a token shift to a few of these areas that will be the foci of community marketing going forwards.

If you hear a consultant (or DMO exec for that matter) claim his or her clients already do these things, grab your wallet and run.  They are full of, well you know.

Those DMOs that are not trapped in Jurassic Marketing by poor and often regressive or lethargic leadership are usually slowed by “fax thinking.”

By this I mean the tendency to always try to keep “plates spinning” long after they have become obsolete. 

Or in the words of Brian Solis, “stuffing promise into familiarity.”