Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
What is the future for food tourism businesses? According to Brian Solis
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the real challenge is changing the way we create experiences for tourists in
the future. In the future culinary tourists will be more empowered due to the
technology at their disposal. This means that positive and negative experi-
ences will be communicated at great speed and be immediate. Tourism oper-
ators will have to listen better, learn quicker and adapt faster.
The key question that all food tourism operators will need to ask is 'What
is the experience you want the tourist to have?' Once that has been answered
then a strategy can be put in place. The thinking process in developing that
strategy should include:
•
How do you convince the prospective culinary tourist - what is the mar-
keting plan?
•
What is the actual hook that will get them to come to visit your establish-
ment?
•
What products can you sell to the culinary tourist that will add value to
the experience and help build loyalty?
•
What plans can you put together to enchant the tourist to come back to
your establishment on another visit?
Although the questions are straightforward the answers and implemen-
tation in the future are more difficult.
As we discussed earlier in this topic there will be three types of culinary
tourists:
1.
Traditional communicating tourists: these are the tourists that will be in-
fluenced by traditional marketing, they will rely on word of mouth and
rarely use the online marketing techniques; they will become less in number,
but will still be a group of significance.
2.
Digital communicating tourists: these tourists live mostly online when
communicating and sourcing information, but will cross-reference with trad-
itional marketing avenues.
3.
Connected tourists: this will be the generation that will be maturing in the next
few years and are connected all the time. They rely on mobile devices and expect
all marketing communications to come to them on a portable mobile device.
In presentations we often have talked about the 'Moment of Truth' and how
important this is when dealing with tourists. Most of us were first exposed
to this concept by Jan Carlzon, the CEO of Scandinavian Airlines and author
of the excellent book
Moments of Truth
.
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In that book Jan highlighted how
important the consumer experience is and how the little points of difference
made a difference; for example, his airline was the first airline that placed
olives with a gin and tonic.
That rule of on-site moments of truth applied throughout the 1980s and
1990s but will not work with tourism businesses going forward.
The moments of truth can now be segmented in new ways. The first step
is now called the Zero Moment of Truth, ZMOT, which occurs when poten-
tial tourists search for your business or location, what is called their social
discovery. This needs to make them want to pursue the journey further.
