I was pleasantly surprised to see the UK office of the Fiji Visitors Bureau show some boldness with an advertising campaign pushing Fiji. The campaign shows an image of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a hibiscus flower behind the ear and was beamed onto numerous London landmarks. It was inevitable that controversy would come out of it given the recent political strain Fiji has been under from much of the world. The controversy, however, has nothing to do with the FVB and they would benefit from keeping the momentum going.
The stated goal of the FVB is marketing Fiji and regardless of my own personal feelings about their locally-based operations, you can't pay for the attention and press they're getting with this campaign. As future tourist bookings to Fiji continue to look quite depressing, the FVB needs to ride this marketing wave and extend the message to other markets. Controversy is good and this kind of controversy will tend to just impact a political message and should have very little bearing on the typical visitor. In other words, when people are choosing between beaches and politics, beaches will generally win.
As far as I know, this campaign represents the first time that the FVB's website has ever been marketed directly and there is no doubt it's resulting in additional traffic to their site. Unfortunately, there was no clear link on bulafiji.com connecting site visitors to that campaign when the images were first beamed onto the London buildings. Instead, people came to the website and were forced to wait unnecessarily long for all the big flash files and other bells and whistles to load before they could find that connection. If they even bothered waiting, they would then have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see another image of Gordon Brown. That mistake has now been partially addressed by moving the UK call-to-action a bit higher on the page but it’s still a sub-par experience. Given the resources the FVB put into the idea, I think they erred on the final implementation by not planning their web response better. Even now as the story continues to get press, they’re not pushing it as hard as they should. This could be due to their own inability to respond quickly to opportunities like this or their tendency to not want to “rock the boat” on the controversy further. If it’s the latter, then the FVB has lost touch with what their role actually is.
Although I’m not a fan of creating inconsistency online, there are some efforts can benefit from different treatment. For example, a UK-specific microsite to receive visitors responding to the campaign could have gone a long way towards converting those people to actually become visitors to Fiji. The web content available now and specific to this campaign is pretty weak and effectively made up of links to other sites. The FVB needs to try and build upon that process more and lead people through the conversion process. That’s what web marketing is about.
This campaign has definitely touched on something, though. Using the familiar faces of people who would normally not be associated with pushing tourism is a really nice differentiator and it’s flexible enough to be used in multiple markets and in multiple ways. Here's my take on this idea for Americans and something people there might respond to. Why not make the message a bit more in-your-face?
The FVB will continue to battle the political challenges Fiji is facing right now. However, there's no reason for them to kowtow. Their mandate should require them to ignore it and simply be focused on what they're supposed to be doing in the first place; Driving tourism to this country and by any means necessary.
[UPDATE: (3 March) The story continues today among other news outlets. ABC Australia quotes the FVB as saying "The Fiji Visitors Bureau is not worried the ad is making waves - it says the response has been fantastic and holiday bookings are up.".]
