Marketing for the Future
Destination Singapore faces a very challenging marketing environment today. The consumer is becoming more technologically-savvy, distracted and consequently more demanding. Disruption is fast becoming the millennial norm and yet there is a rapidly growing grey segment, resulting in a dichotomy of worlds and explosion in developments.
Meanwhile, destinations in the region, and around the world, are stepping up their game with new tourism attractions and increased marketing investments. Against this highly competitive scene, Singapore faces a multitude of resource constraints while continuing to battle entrenched misperception issues. There is a greater need for Destination Singapore to sharpen our marketing efforts in order to realise Singapore’s ambitions in continuing to grow tourism receipts (TR) and visitor arrivals (VA) in the next few years.
It is clear, however, that traditional marketing is no longer enough to cut through the clutter. Marketing efforts by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and Singapore travel industry have evolved over the years in scope, approach and budget. But with challenges and competition arising, we need to evolve our marketing further to better capitalise on fast-changing trends and realise opportunities. Hence, a new holistic and cogent marketing strategy is needed.
To better guide the formulation of our new marketing strategy, we ask ourselves two main questions:
The vision we have for Destination Singapore is to **build **on our **foundational strengths **to achieve **agile, bold and creative destination marketing **that **inspires **and delivers results.
This vision will greatly enhance our resolve in the years ahead to parlay our current strengths into even better destination marketing works, while plugging gaps in systems and capabilities.
In approaching our marketing strategy, we first looked at how destination marketing has evolved over the years and where our various initiatives and activities are within the consumer journey. Applying additional considerations such as story, substance, simplicity, speed and science (Gordon & Perrey, 2015), we derive 3 strategic thrusts for the marketing of Singapore:
Strategic Thrust 1: Telling a Great Singapore Story
The first strategic thrust is about telling a great Singapore story. In today’s world where consumers have greater control over what information they receive, brands and destinations must be able to tell better stories to reach consumers and get their attention. Hence, we must first have a great story, one that is of Singapore and its unique identity and history, told in endless ways by different people. It is about being confident in who and what we are, and not be everything to everybody. There are three strategies in this first thrust.
Firstly, to tell a great story, we need a great brand. We will review our destination brand and consider how we can adopt a larger perspective beyond the tourism aspects to give us a Singapore brand story that has deeper roots into our cultural and historical identity. Such a brand story will also give us a wider scope to appeal to the more demanding consumers of the future.
The story of Singapore is also best told by people who know it in its myriad aspects; STB alone cannot carry the story. As the story of a multi-faceted Singapore goes beyond tourism, and in order to tell it in its entirety, we will look to increase our collaborations with relevant government agencies and industry partners to synergise and amplify one another’s outreach efforts.
There are two potential collaborative initiatives STB can embark on with various agencies and industry partners. The first is content seeding, through which we will cross-share our content on each other’s platforms and marketing activities. The second is a series of experiential showcases and activations between relevant agencies and partners to bring a slice of Singapore to our overseas audience.
To reach discerning consumers, we should also raise awareness and understanding of Singapore by using content that is not tourism-related but yet distinct to the Singapore identity. Some examples include the quirkiness of “Singlish”, the strengths of our education system and our expertise in cutting-edge technology.
Secondly, we will entrench the brand story through a focused and sustained global campaign over the next few years. For the brand story to take root, substantive investments are required. Also, an extensive global marketing campaign is critical as a bedrock for supporting tactical marketing activities. While the campaign will be global in extent, we will allow for localised nuances and provide freedom within a framework to cater to individual market needs.
Thirdly, we will deepen the brand story with rich content in different forms as its depth and colour cannot be conveyed through a global campaign alone. We will adopt two systematic content frameworks. One is the hero-hub-hygiene (HHH) framework (YouTube), which guides the types and objectives of content that will be created. The other is the create/co-create/curate approach, which governs the origination of content. To up the ante on content creation, we will institute a Destination Newsroom, which is a technology-enabled newsroom that generates timely & trend-specific stories.
Strategic Thrust 2: Targeting the Right Fans
Our second strategic thrust is about getting the right fans for the story we would like to tell. To reach the right fans, we need to sharpen our current target audience approach. We have two strategies that centre on fans and markets.
Firstly, we are refining our target audience into global customer segments with distinct personas. Our target audience is currently defined by travel preferences and income levels. With global customer segments, we are moving towards a deeper understanding of the target audience by layering on psychographic and demographic information. This will give us distinct personas that can in turn sharpen how we produce content to get their attention.
By examining past data and assessing future potential, we will explore four distinct customer segments that are broadly classified into the following categories:
Secondly, we will aim for a more balanced market portfolio by strengthening our base in Asia and diversifying into markets beyond Asia. This will help broaden our visitor sources and build resilience to drive sustainable growth as Singapore currently gets almost 80% of its visitor arrivals from Asia-Pacific. We also need to take into consideration the key sources of the four customer segments.
As a start, we will maintain and expand our Asian stronghold by investing further into top source markets and extracting further growth by scaling up investments in Tier 2 cities of Indonesia, China and India. We will also increase marketing efforts in high- growth Asian markets like South Korea and Vietnam. To buffer ourselves, we will also invest more in the traditional long-haul markets like USA and UK, and diversify into high-growth ones like Russia and Switzerland.
Strategic Thrust 3: Enhancing Our Delivery
With a story in hand and the fans to reach out to, we need to deliver to them better. We need to personalise our marketing to ensure what reaches our target audience is most relevant and compelling. This will in turn generate better leads and enable greater rates of conversion.
Our third strategic thrust is all about enhancing the delivery of the right content and information to the right people, at the right time, and at the right place. Our four strategies under this thrust are centred on building the right eco-system to deliver our stories better.
Firstly, before we deliver well, we must know our fans extremely well and in ways hitherto untapped. By knowing them better than our competitors, we will have a better chance of getting their attention. To do this, we will build a data management & analytics hub to draw insights from multiple data points that will in turn enable us to respond in a highly-personalised fashion. With partnership deals in place, we will be able to respond relevantly to specific targets to develop deeper engagement, generate leads and drive conversions.
Secondly, in an age of hyper-rich content, the issue is not a lack of stories and information but the collection, management and distribution of it. STB, as a neutral party, is in a prime position to play this role of information and services management. We will create a central hub for information and services that aggregates the latest destination content and services, and enables its distribution and updating seamlessly across partners and platforms.
Thirdly, we must enable fellow Singaporeans and in-market fans to tell their own stories as word-of-mouth (WOM) through friends and family remains the most powerful distribution channel due to a high trust factor. Equipping Singaporeans, residents and in-market fans with the right information, impetus and platforms will work this most powerful and yet elusive of channels to our favour.
Examples of initiatives we can consider implementing: one, through social media takeovers, we can let Singaporeans or fans take over our social media assets for a day to share their stories of Singapore. Two, we can use social-sharing platforms that will allow Singaporeans to connect with visitors and overseas fans through mutual interests and passion points.
Last but not least, we have to continue experimenting boldly with new channels to better market Singapore. To keep up with the latest trends, it is important that there is a culture and mechanism for experimentation. One way to do this is to explore the institution of a marketing innovation fund, through which companies with great ideas can partner us in test-bedding new concepts.
Gearing Up
We would need to track not just the implementation of this marketing strategy but also its success. We will put in place critical resources and processes to ensure the eventual success of our marketing strategy.
To ensure that we closely track the progress of the strategy and various work plans, we will build a dashboard of success measures in three main categories: wallet, mind and heart share. We will use our data management and analytics hub to produce real- time indicators that enable us to be agile in changing course if necessary.
Talent and capability would also be instrumental in conquering new frontiers. There will be a formal marketing training and development programme with the setting up of an STB Marketing College to train and track marketing officers in their abilities to carry out various aspects of marketing work. Our industry partners will also benefit through a complementary tourism partner marketing capability programme.
Marketing for the Future
Destination Singapore faces a very challenging marketing environment today. The consumer is becoming more technologically-savvy, distracted and consequently more demanding. Disruption is fast becoming the millennial norm and yet there is a rapidly growing grey segment, resulting in a dichotomy of worlds and explosion in developments.
Meanwhile, destinations in the region, and around the world, are stepping up their game with new tourism attractions and increased marketing investments. Against this highly competitive scene, Singapore faces a multitude of resource constraints while continuing to battle entrenched misperception issues. There is a greater need for Destination Singapore to sharpen our marketing efforts in order to realise Singapore’s ambitions in continuing to grow tourism receipts (TR) and visitor arrivals (VA) in the next few years.
It is clear, however, that traditional marketing is no longer enough to cut through the clutter. Marketing efforts by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and Singapore travel industry have evolved over the years in scope, approach and budget. But with challenges and competition arising, we need to evolve our marketing further to better capitalise on fast-changing trends and realise opportunities. Hence, a new holistic and cogent marketing strategy is needed.
To better guide the formulation of our new marketing strategy, we ask ourselves two main questions:
The vision we have for Destination Singapore is to **build **on our **foundational strengths **to achieve **agile, bold and creative destination marketing **that **inspires **and delivers results.
This vision will greatly enhance our resolve in the years ahead to parlay our current strengths into even better destination marketing works, while plugging gaps in systems and capabilities.
In approaching our marketing strategy, we first looked at how destination marketing has evolved over the years and where our various initiatives and activities are within the consumer journey. Applying additional considerations such as story, substance, simplicity, speed and science (Gordon & Perrey, 2015), we derive 3 strategic thrusts for the marketing of Singapore:
Strategic Thrust 1: Telling a Great Singapore Story
The first strategic thrust is about telling a great Singapore story. In today’s world where consumers have greater control over what information they receive, brands and destinations must be able to tell better stories to reach consumers and get their attention. Hence, we must first have a great story, one that is of Singapore and its unique identity and history, told in endless ways by different people. It is about being confident in who and what we are, and not be everything to everybody. There are three strategies in this first thrust.
Firstly, to tell a great story, we need a great brand. We will review our destination brand and consider how we can adopt a larger perspective beyond the tourism aspects to give us a Singapore brand story that has deeper roots into our cultural and historical identity. Such a brand story will also give us a wider scope to appeal to the more demanding consumers of the future.
The story of Singapore is also best told by people who know it in its myriad aspects; STB alone cannot carry the story. As the story of a multi-faceted Singapore goes beyond tourism, and in order to tell it in its entirety, we will look to increase our collaborations with relevant government agencies and industry partners to synergise and amplify one another’s outreach efforts.
There are two potential collaborative initiatives STB can embark on with various agencies and industry partners. The first is content seeding, through which we will cross-share our content on each other’s platforms and marketing activities. The second is a series of experiential showcases and activations between relevant agencies and partners to bring a slice of Singapore to our overseas audience.
To reach discerning consumers, we should also raise awareness and understanding of Singapore by using content that is not tourism-related but yet distinct to the Singapore identity. Some examples include the quirkiness of “Singlish”, the strengths of our education system and our expertise in cutting-edge technology.
Secondly, we will entrench the brand story through a focused and sustained global campaign over the next few years. For the brand story to take root, substantive investments are required. Also, an extensive global marketing campaign is critical as a bedrock for supporting tactical marketing activities. While the campaign will be global in extent, we will allow for localised nuances and provide freedom within a framework to cater to individual market needs.
Thirdly, we will deepen the brand story with rich content in different forms as its depth and colour cannot be conveyed through a global campaign alone. We will adopt two systematic content frameworks. One is the hero-hub-hygiene (HHH) framework (YouTube), which guides the types and objectives of content that will be created. The other is the create/co-create/curate approach, which governs the origination of content. To up the ante on content creation, we will institute a Destination Newsroom, which is a technology-enabled newsroom that generates timely & trend-specific stories.
Strategic Thrust 2: Targeting the Right Fans
Our second strategic thrust is about getting the right fans for the story we would like to tell. To reach the right fans, we need to sharpen our current target audience approach. We have two strategies that centre on fans and markets.
Firstly, we are refining our target audience into global customer segments with distinct personas. Our target audience is currently defined by travel preferences and income levels. With global customer segments, we are moving towards a deeper understanding of the target audience by layering on psychographic and demographic information. This will give us distinct personas that can in turn sharpen how we produce content to get their attention.
By examining past data and assessing future potential, we will explore four distinct customer segments that are broadly classified into the following categories:
Secondly, we will aim for a more balanced market portfolio by strengthening our base in Asia and diversifying into markets beyond Asia. This will help broaden our visitor sources and build resilience to drive sustainable growth as Singapore currently gets almost 80% of its visitor arrivals from Asia-Pacific. We also need to take into consideration the key sources of the four customer segments.
As a start, we will maintain and expand our Asian stronghold by investing further into top source markets and extracting further growth by scaling up investments in Tier 2 cities of Indonesia, China and India. We will also increase marketing efforts in high- growth Asian markets like South Korea and Vietnam. To buffer ourselves, we will also invest more in the traditional long-haul markets like USA and UK, and diversify into high-growth ones like Russia and Switzerland.
Strategic Thrust 3: Enhancing Our Delivery
With a story in hand and the fans to reach out to, we need to deliver to them better. We need to personalise our marketing to ensure what reaches our target audience is most relevant and compelling. This will in turn generate better leads and enable greater rates of conversion.
Our third strategic thrust is all about enhancing the delivery of the right content and information to the right people, at the right time, and at the right place. Our four strategies under this thrust are centred on building the right eco-system to deliver our stories better.
Firstly, before we deliver well, we must know our fans extremely well and in ways hitherto untapped. By knowing them better than our competitors, we will have a better chance of getting their attention. To do this, we will build a data management & analytics hub to draw insights from multiple data points that will in turn enable us to respond in a highly-personalised fashion. With partnership deals in place, we will be able to respond relevantly to specific targets to develop deeper engagement, generate leads and drive conversions.
Secondly, in an age of hyper-rich content, the issue is not a lack of stories and information but the collection, management and distribution of it. STB, as a neutral party, is in a prime position to play this role of information and services management. We will create a central hub for information and services that aggregates the latest destination content and services, and enables its distribution and updating seamlessly across partners and platforms.
Thirdly, we must enable fellow Singaporeans and in-market fans to tell their own stories as word-of-mouth (WOM) through friends and family remains the most powerful distribution channel due to a high trust factor. Equipping Singaporeans, residents and in-market fans with the right information, impetus and platforms will work this most powerful and yet elusive of channels to our favour.
Examples of initiatives we can consider implementing: one, through social media takeovers, we can let Singaporeans or fans take over our social media assets for a day to share their stories of Singapore. Two, we can use social-sharing platforms that will allow Singaporeans to connect with visitors and overseas fans through mutual interests and passion points.
Last but not least, we have to continue experimenting boldly with new channels to better market Singapore. To keep up with the latest trends, it is important that there is a culture and mechanism for experimentation. One way to do this is to explore the institution of a marketing innovation fund, through which companies with great ideas can partner us in test-bedding new concepts.
Gearing Up
We would need to track not just the implementation of this marketing strategy but also its success. We will put in place critical resources and processes to ensure the eventual success of our marketing strategy.
To ensure that we closely track the progress of the strategy and various work plans, we will build a dashboard of success measures in three main categories: wallet, mind and heart share. We will use our data management and analytics hub to produce real- time indicators that enable us to be agile in changing course if necessary.
Talent and capability would also be instrumental in conquering new frontiers. There will be a formal marketing training and development programme with the setting up of an STB Marketing College to train and track marketing officers in their abilities to carry out various aspects of marketing work. Our industry partners will also benefit through a complementary tourism partner marketing capability programme.
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