I'm back!!
Last year was an extraordinary year. For nine months, I was involved in phase one of a massive three phase branding project for Tourism Malaysia, one of the most ambitious NTA's in the region.
Phase one consisted of 39 focus groups in 13 locations in 12 countries on five continents, and I visited four of them in about five weeks. Other elements of phase 1 included online surveys, internal brand audit. An external brand audit that involved discussions with key influencers around the world, communications audits - both digital & print. A Consumer Generated Media (CGM) project that monitored more than 16 million blogs, listservs and other chatter for months. A mystery shop of the client's operations in the 12 countries as well as at home.
Once the research was carried out, numerous discussions held and countless presentations made, we sat down and preparred a report that is more than 300,000 words. This report pulled no punches and to their credit, Tourism Malaysia listened to the findings and recommendations and started implementing many of the before the ink was dry.
As these recommendations were being implemented, other more long term strategic issues needed to be addressed. These include sales processes, in particular lead gathering & management and distribution and development of sales programmes. Structures built to ensure consistency in execution, reporting tools and mechanisms developed and put into place and so on. These strategic issues are to be addressed with the development of segmented brand plans. We've started on the plans and should be done in about 3-4 months. Once the plans are developed, execution will begin.
I'll let you know how the plans are going. In the meantime, I expect to contribute a couple of commentaries (rants) every month. Feel free to comment on my posts any time.
TEXT
Phase one consisted of 39 focus groups in 13 locations in 12 countries on five continents, and I visited four of them in about five weeks. Other elements of phase 1 included online surveys, internal brand audit. An external brand audit that involved discussions with key influencers around the world, communications audits - both digital & print. A Consumer Generated Media (CGM) project that monitored more than 16 million blogs, listservs and other chatter for months. A mystery shop of the client's operations in the 12 countries as well as at home.
Once the research was carried out, numerous discussions held and countless presentations made, we sat down and preparred a report that is more than 300,000 words. This report pulled no punches and to their credit, Tourism Malaysia listened to the findings and recommendations and started implementing many of the before the ink was dry.
As these recommendations were being implemented, other more long term strategic issues needed to be addressed. These include sales processes, in particular lead gathering & management and distribution and development of sales programmes. Structures built to ensure consistency in execution, reporting tools and mechanisms developed and put into place and so on. These strategic issues are to be addressed with the development of segmented brand plans. We've started on the plans and should be done in about 3-4 months. Once the plans are developed, execution will begin.
I'll let you know how the plans are going. In the meantime, I expect to contribute a couple of commentaries (rants) every month. Feel free to comment on my posts any time.
Labels: brand audit, brand research, CGM, communications audit, tourism branding
posted by Marcus Osborne at 12:54 pm
2 comments
