An incentive destination of its kind

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With the objective to promote Queensland as an incentive destination in the country, Ryna Sequiera- Marketing Manager, Tourism Queensland, India is steering the brand with innovative marketing and prudent trade partnership

Q] Could you throw some light on the ‘million dollar memo’ campaign that you’ve undertaken? How are you going about it?

The ‘million dollar memo’ campaign basically began on March 18th this year. It was our entry into the incentive travel segment. Tourism Queensland has not really done anything to promote Queensland as a MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions) destination. So as a five years policy we have put down how we want to work towards basically promoting Queensland for MICE because we are already getting a lot of MICE business from India and globally as well. So we thought what better than to launch ourselves into this segment by coming up with an extremely attractive consumer campaign which is called ‘million dollar memo’.

With this campaign we went out to the entire corporate world and challenged them to come and participate in a competition where the final price is worth one million dollars. We asked them to put up a 60 second video on the website milliondollarmemo.com where they have to demonstrate through the video what teamwork means to them or why their company is the best place to work, why Queensland is the best incentive destination in the world and why do they think we should reward them the one million dollars.

20 of the most entertaining videos will be shortlisted by the end of the competition and one person will come from each company in August to compete against each other to win the prize money.

Q] How are you communicating these aspects of the contest in India?

We basically tied up with Thomas Cook in India to launch this campaign where firstly, we sent out electronic direct mailers to thousand plus corporates in India. We were pretty focused on these corporate and did not want to make it a mass campaign. Secondly, we’ve done outdoor campaign in Mumbai by taking a few billboards in south Mumbai, bus shelters and LCDs in corporate houses. Finally we did the dabbawallah campaign where we sent out memos in each of the dabbas that went into sections of Nariman Point, Fort, Mumbai Central, Dadar, Prabhadevi, BKC, etc. We sent out one lakh such memos.

Q] How has been the response for the entire campaign?

In terms of publicity it has been great. People were really excited on hearing about the campaign. However, so far we have only one entry from India. So in terms of generating excitement and interest in Queensland, the campaign has been great but from competition point of view, we haven’t got too many entries from India.

Q] While people have responded to the campaign and shown interest but when it comes to actually shooting the video and participating, the Indian audiences have backed out. What do you read of this?

Yes, it actually depends on the market. We’ve got 87 entries already globally. So, it really depends on companies and it is a personal choice. We have got responses saying that it is a brilliant campaign but we are not allowed to participate from the company. We did the ‘the best job in the world’ campaign two years back which was the most incredible marketing campaign by any tourism body or company. There we came out with a similar thing where a person had to shoot a video and that got a tremendous response. We got nearly 35,000 entries from all across the world and more than 2000 entries from India. Only difference was that it was an individual thing where people had to sit and shoot themselves and upload the video, here it is about a team and the company. So we understand that difference and it is not that we’ve done something wrong or could have done better. It is a brilliant concept but at the end of the day the company has to come up and take the effort to participate.

Q] What are the digital marketing efforts that you have put into this campaign?

For this particular campaign and even for our foray into the incentive travel segment, we’ve launched a website called queens land incentives. com. Apart from that we have had a website for the ‘million dollar memo’ campaign since the day we launched. We are present on every social network site may it be Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Q] What was your total marketing and advertising spends behind this campaign? Globally, the campaign cost us six million dollars (AUD). For marketing in India, we’ve put in 50,000 AUD. Out of which, the major chunk went into outdoor media.

Q] What is the overall brand strategy of Tourism Queensland in India? How are you now positioning yourself as an incentive destination in the country?

We revamped our entire brand in November 2010 and called it ‘Queensland, where Australia shines’. We launched our India specific website in January this year. And we have pretty much established our brand before but after the ‘best job in the world campaign’ we needed a brand revamp. And so we launched this particular campaign across the world. India of course is a major source market for us and in the next ten years we want really to grow our visitor numbers for Queensland.

Q] What will be your marketing approach for the same? What are your marketing plans for the next two years?

We work very closely with travel agents in India and so in every season we partner with ‘x’ number of travel agents and do massive advertising campaigns and sometimes TV. We do a lot of PR activities with tourism Australia and take media around to Queensland, etc. So that happens throughout the year. And now with our incentive destination positioning we will also take corporate town to Queensland and show them around. Apart from that we will be focusing on MICE travel agents because they are the ones who will eventually convert this entire campaign into real business.

Q] What has been your key challenge in promoting this brand in India?

We haven’t really had many challenges; however, I think the timing of this campaign would be essential. We were going to launch this campaign in February this year but considering the weather conditions in Queensland we had to postpone the launch of the campaign. That was probably the only thing otherwise everything was bang on.

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