Reason 3 – Collaboration makes sense for tourism

We thought we would take this opportunity to share what we, the team at The Marketing Collective, enjoy about working in tourism and how we’re championing the industry.

Reason 3 – Collaboration makes sense for tourism

Working together to make life easier and to achieve something bigger and better is what we all do, whether it is for a DIY project, art project or something as everyday as cooking a meal - when we work together, it becomes easier with often greater results and generally, much more fun!So it makes perfect sense for attractions, traders, hotels and businesses within tourism to work together in collaboration.However, to get to the stage of working together, there is a (big) hurdle to overcome, and that is the hurdle of competition and, the aged thought that competitors are threats. Within every business, it is of course, important to know who your competitors are and what they are offering. This helps to identify opportunities and help you benchmark your own successes. Competition is healthy and shouldn’t be seen as a barrier to business.At The Marketing Collective, we encourage businesses to look beyond the barrier of competition and the idea of keeping doors closed, to working in co-operation and collaboration to build a competitive advantage to other areas. We like the word co-opertition!We help businesses to stop seeing the neighbouring venues as competition but to see that the real competition is the neighbouring village, town, city, county or region. If a visitor isn’t going to come to your venue – surely it is better for them to go to somewhere else in the same destination and thus contribute to the local economy.We like to join businesses and match services / products with others who have the same ethos and goals.This is what we have done with Hampshire’s Top Attractions – a marketing consortium of over 50 attractions in Hampshire all working together to increase visits and stays to the county. We work with them to develop their strategic aims as a consortium, identify their unique selling points, strengths and opportunities and then delivering the marketing plan which has involved some brilliant and fun projects such as the launch of Harry Hampshire and his video of travels around the attractions.We work with many other collaborative groups including hoteliers associations, B&B networks, traders associations and heritage attractions – all of which are about collaboration and achieving more as a greater voice. The most recent being the Oxford Street Traders Association in Southampton who recognise that together, they stand a greater chance of attracting visitors to the historic yet cosmopolitan area of the city, despite the large new developments that are taking place.Our strength is in communication and our focus is building consumer relationships with our brands. Working collectively allows processes to be interactive and engaging, not only with like-minded individuals and businesses but also with consumers.And it is great for peer to peer networking; there is always someone who ‘knows someone’ and through that network of communication and working together, destination marketing can not only be more cost effective on resources providing a more yielding profit but it can be more innovative and creative.We all know two heads are better than one!*VisitEngland Key facts and Trends 2014