Marketing
The right brand name The right brand name is undeniably important, and some companies spend millions on picking the right one. It is, therefore, probably quite annoying when people spell that brand name incorrectly. I should know – my surname seems to take on numerous variations when people try to spell it, and this really [...]
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Tactical travel? On the Guardian website, there is currently a feature bearing the headline: “Help save Greece! It’s time for tactical travel”. The standfirst reads: “A holiday to see one of humanity’s greatest civilisations may be just the boost the economy needs right now. After all, we owe them for Delphi.” Admittedly, the work of [...]
Australia’s tourism problems Tourism in Australia is currently struggling. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why – the Australian dollar is so high at the moment that it makes the country extremely expensive to visit. There’s no point pretending otherwise, which is why Ben Groundwater’s recent post on the Sydney Morning Herald website [...]
Samoa skips a day The newspapers today are full of the news that the Pacific nation of Samoa has decided to skip a day by moving to the other side of the International Date Line. The idea is to be in roughly the same time zone as trading partners in Australia and New Zealand, but [...]
Marketing Sheffield and other secondary cities Just before I toddled off to Australia for a couple of weeks in mid-February, I read an interesting interview on Sheffield Blog with Wendy Ulyett, tourism manager for Marketing Sheffield. Among the topics covered were why Sheffield is now being promoted separately from Yorkshire South (and let’s face it, [...]
Continue reading about A destination marketing dilemma: How do you sell a city like Sheffield?
Tomorrow, I am flying to Australia via Taiwan with China Airlines. After booking this, I was prompted to look at what you get when you put “China Airlines” into a Google image search. It is mighty encouraging… But the experience got me thinking. How do other airlines come across in pictures? So I put their [...]
Much ado about Naples On Wednesday morning, I was putting together an article about York. I’d just written that Laterooms.com is a decent place to look for deals on B&Bs when Rotterdam-based travel writer Shaney Hudson said something rather interesting on Twitter. Shaney had spotted a sizable chunk of her article on Naples quoted in [...]
Continue reading about A dubious approach to website content
What follows is, roughly, what I said in my presentation at Travel Blog Camp 2010 in London earlier this week. Other aspects of the speech – ‘What blogging and tweeting has done for me’ and ‘Models for monetising blogs’ can be found on separate pages. Outdated labels I’m a firm believer in the need to [...]
Continue reading about What journalists, bloggers and marketers can learn from each other
That sound you just heard was me hefting my considerable weight onto an already creaking bandwagon. But following on from Ewen Bell‘s magnificent video explanation of how to become a travel writer, I thought I’d give a few marketing tips in a visual format as well… I feel that I ought to, at this point, [...]
Ten tips for getting yourself noticed: PART ONE In recent times, I have come across a number of really interesting projects – be they unusual tours, genuinely excellent B&Bs or quirky experiences. And there seem to be some common themes with them. Firstly, they’re small, independent operations run by one or two people without [...]