COMCEC Tourism Outlook-2018
27
marketing models is an important step for OIC countries. Equity, participation, accountability,
responsiveness, transparency, monitoring and control are other features of effective central
marketing strategies.
Destinations creating such structures and policies demonstrate more successful outcomes.
Hence analysis of destination marketing strategies both for planned and current destinations
might offer valuable insights and building blocks for OIC destinations. Benchmarking various
best practices and institutional landscapes, planning a sustained image, involving all
stakeholders, ensuring effective marketing of the destination, improving visitor loyalty and
recommendation might also be possible through efficient marketing strategies. This topic also
relates to various other problems faced by OIC countries such as; creating tourism products,
segmenting, targeting, positioning and branding destinations, increasing number of overnights
and per tourist spending, enhancing loyalty and recommendation, electronic marketing,
creating and managing distribution channels and so on. If effective destination marketing
strategies might be identified most of these challenges might be prevented and overcome easier.
Major DMO responsibilities are displayed on table 4.4.
Table 4.4. Major DMO Responsibilities
Step Aim Responsibility
Segmentation
Secure full institutional
support
Involvement and support by senior
management in all organisational units.
Management.
Determine the ideal
market segment
Agreement within the organisation on which
criteria will be used to evaluate segments.
Management.
Collecting data Have available high-quality, valid, relevant
empirical data.
Management.
Data analyst.
Exploring data Insight into the structure of the data to
determine nature of the segmentation
solution.
Data analyst.
Extracting segments Grouping consumers into segments. Data analyst.
Profiling segments Identifying the key defining characteristics of
each segment.
Data analyst.
Describing segments Providing a rich description of each market
segment.
Data analyst.
Targeting
Evaluating segments Use the segment evaluation criteria identified
earlier to evaluate selected segments.
Management.
Selecting (a) target
segment(s)
Based on this evaluation select one or a small
number of market segments to target.
Management.
Customizing the product,
price, distribution and
promotion
Using the profiling and rich descriptive
information about the target segment(s) to
develop a customized marketing mix.
Management.
Positioning
Determining the optimal
positioning
Using the profiling and rich descriptive
information about the target segment(s) to
develop a positioning strategy.
Management.