Marketing in a crisis: lessons from Tourism Australia
2020 has been a challenging year, but Storyation co-founder Lauren Quaintance looks at just how challenging it has been for client Tourism Australia.
Here we are at the end of the worst year any of us can remember and it’s more than likely that right now you are being inundated with earnest posts about what our industry can learn from this annus horribilis.
You’d have to say that Tourism Australia’s CMO Susan Coghill has had a harder year than most. Last December her first international campaign as CMO – the Matesong campaign in the UK featuring Kylie Minogue – was unceremoniously pulled after 22 days due to the negative impact of global media coverage of the bushfires.
In 2020 Tourism Australia has endured three “once-in-a-lifetime disasters” – the bushfires, international border closures and state border closures – which have all but decimated the tourism industry.
In March Coghill found herself with an international brand tarnished by the bushfires, a complete absence of international travellers, an extremely limited domestic opportunity and an industry desperately in need of help.
It would have been easy to panic.
Instead the marketing team at Tourism Australia refocused on five principles that Coghill says meant they could ensure that marketing remained a strategic resource for the business and the industry.
- Know your reason for being
It sounds simple enough – most marketers would claim to have a clear view of what role their brand can and should play – but there’s nothing like the stress of a crisis to test your resolve.
For Tourism Australia this meant resisting the urge of stakeholders to get involved on the supply side of tourism – that is offering grants or business training. The marketing team was clear that the most effective role they could play was in driving demand.
“When you must make tough calls, your job will be a lot harder if you’re unsure of your role,” says Coghill. “The way we support tourism is largely through demand creation. And we are very clear on that.”
- Know your customer (really know them)
It goes without saying this year has been like no other when it comes to the importance of ‘reading the room’.
Knowing exactly who your customer is, and what’s important to them at any given moment has never been more critical.
“We are living in a time of incredible change – consumer needs and perceptions are in flux,” says Coghill.
To better understand their customer Tourism Australia invested in new sources of data, looked for more meaningful insights, and used better analysis to try and understand the specific stage of recovery each of the country’s 15 international markets as well the different states of Australia.
They established something called the “Green Light Project” – a dashboard that pulls together data such as border status, aviation capacity, forward bookings, travel search, and consumer confidence and sentiment around travel to give them an insight into sentiment.
- Build the case for creative before a crisis
This makes so much sense.
But not enough people are talking about the need for selling well and selling early, as this extraordinary year draws to a close.
It’s particularly true for an organisation like Tourism Australia that has a number of stakeholders – including industry, the board and government.
Says Coghill: “The best way to see innovative marketing ideas through to fruition is to ensure we have engaged the right people early on and rallied support along the way…”
- Play the long and the short game
Tourism Australia stopped marketing domestically more than eight years ago and focused its efforts on selling the continent around the world.
When the bushfires hit, Tourism Australia began to rally locals to travel to bushfire-affected regions and this continued as borders closed.
Although this wasn’t about brand building it was, just as importantly, “about creating a movement and driving immediate action” says Coghill.
The marketing team was clear that at the same time they needed to continue to “drive the long game” by staying active in overseas markets.
“The work we do locally to drive Australians to get out to those bucket list destinations helps to ensure that we have a competitive offering internationally on the other side of this crisis,” says Coghill.
- Kill your darlings
Writers love to talk about that famous term “kill your darlings”.
It’s a concept that can just as easily be applied to marketing. Knowing when to kill a campaign – even one that is the result of months of work – is just as important as knowing when to run one in the first place. It’s about the right timing and tone.
As well as the Matesong campaign Tourism Australia has had to put “a lot of wonderful thinking” on hold amid border changes to travel restrictions this year.
“We know that great things rise from the ashes of other great work.” says Coghill. “It’s important to have the confidence that there will be other great ideas in the future.”
Lauren Quaintance is the co-founder of Storyation. Tourism Australia is a client of Storyation.
