My only concern is that you haven’t taken into account the needs of your visitors, whether there will be a different approach for domestic and international visitors and also repeat visitors.

We were tasked with a similar project for a SE Asian country but our research showed that there were 600,000 competing communities in Asia and more than 1,000 regional and national economic development agencies, all competing for visitors. This made it easy for even the most compelling messages to get lost amid all the destination claims.

We recommended to the client therefore that in this cluttered world, effective branding depends on data and knowledge about current and prospective visitors and not simply on trendy creative campaigns.

We recommended to our client that choosing the most effective branding strategy depended on sound market & customer research to determine current attitudes and perceptions toward the country among travel agents, previous visitors to the country and those that had never visited the country.

By understanding the sources of those perceptions and attitudes, we proposed that the client would be better able to evaluate current branding efforts, develop strategies to target high-impact segments with the most potential more effectively, drive internal education and other program development, leverage the emerging medium of the Internet, develop benchmarks to measure branding progress and ensure that resources were used cost-effectively.

The research could also be used to pinpoint, prioritise and drive community-based branding. A core requirement as consumers spend more time in those communities.

Initial indications are that this process has been effective as the country reached 2010 visitor targets at the end of 2009.