My Turn

Use PR to promote tourism

 

The Ministry of Tourism once advertised on the United States Cable News Network (CNN) to attract tourists to visit the Warm Heart of Africa, Malawi, which in the Malawi Tourism Guide is described as “a hidden gem awaiting discovery”.

The Daily Times recently quoted principal secretary for Tourism, Elsie Tembo, as having said it would cost the ministry $630 000 (about K353 million) to advertise on CNN for six months and that Malawi negotiated for a package of $500 000 (roughly K280 million). The logic is that international advertising is vital to make Malawi’s tourism products visible and contribute to gross domestic product (GDP).

I beg to differ with this school of thought. My argument is that advertising is an ineffective and expensive way of promoting Malawi tourism. Advertising is also perceived to be deceptive and most viewers are skeptical of adverts. Besides that, advertising involves one-way communication and this precludes feedback due to lack of stakeholder engagement.

I would, therefore, recommend that the Ministry of Information, Tourism and Civic Education adopts public relations (PR) as a strategy to attract tourists to visit Malawi, instead of advertising.

PR aims to establish and maintain mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and the public on whom its success or failure depends.

The success of Malawi’s tourism industry, therefore, depends on building and maintaining relationships with tourists, tour operators, airlines, travel agents and writers, journalists, hotels, local communities, tourist attraction sites, transport providers, tourism associations and other stakeholders. You cannot build relationships with all these stakeholders through advertising!

PR provides a platform for stakeholder engagement and communication is not an end in itself, but a means to build and maintain those relationships. It also provides two-way communication which involves dialogue, balanced power relations, reciprocal communication and mutual understanding. This is not the case with advertising in which communication is one-way and it is an end in itself.

PR is a highly cost-effective and credible alternative to conventional advertising in an era of escalating media costs. By using PR, the ministry could save millions of taxpayers’ money and use some of the funds for PR campaigns which are cost-effective.

Such PR campaigns would also allow the ministry to conduct research and analysis which would lay the foundation for setting specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound objectives.

Furthermore, with PR campaigns, the ministry would be able to identify the appropriate target audience, messaging, medium, tactics and most importantly, how the campaign should be measured and evaluated.

The Internet has impacted the tourism sector and tourists substantially as tourists have become social media savvy. Research shows that tourists are now using the Internet to plan their vacations, communicate with friends and family while on vacation, memorialise their vacations with photos on websites and blogs and recommend their vacation experiences to others via a range of social media platforms such as Trip Advisor, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Instagram.

Similarly, tourist destinations are using social media to engage tourists and form online brand communities. Such online brand communities are critical in any tourism promotion strategy. Unfortunately, the ministry does not have a vibrant social media presence and this means that there is lack of online engagement with tourists.

Indeed, the ministry could also optimise media relations, a critical aspect of public relations, by organising experiential trips for bloggers, travel writers and journalists to visit the country’s tourist attraction sites and write news articles and features.

Another challenge affecting tourism in Malawi is lack of direct flights, which makes the country an expensive destination. The aviation industry is an important stakeholder and PR could come in handy in engaging and persuading airlines to resume direct flights to Malawi which would, in turn, attract more tourists. n

 

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One Comment

  1. That’s right on the mark, I hope and believe the Ministry of Tourism has read this article. Not only read it but put into action what this author has argued. I surely buy this guy;s idea. Who watches CNN in the UK or Germany anyway? Even more so in South Africa? These three countries contribute to a huge chunk of tourists visiting Malawi that the United States. The tourism guys should have also researched into media audiences against the statistics of the origins of the visitors that we get in Malawi. Great Britain, Germany and most of all South Africa represent those countries, is CNN watched there? NO. Where do Americans most go? Not in Malawi. Why not capitalise on those that we already get and create more from there rather than pay CNN such huge amounts of money. Poor marketing research, if they actually did that at all.

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