Reef our brand focus
The Far North’s move to embrace Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef in its domestic marketing is a move in the right direction.
Already used internationally, Tourism Tropical North Queensland yesterday flagged it would adopt the locationbased branding to tell the region’s unique stories through print, digital media and user-generated content on both the domestic and global stages going forward.
On the back of a torturous start to the year, this newspaper produced the Tourism, It’s Priceless campaign in March, highlighting the sector’s importance to the region and the issues challenging its success. During the course of the editorial campaign, three key issues were identified as needing addressing for the industry to grow. They were branding, funding and aviation.
The region’s brand — Tropical North Queensland — was a hot topic, with debate on its effectiveness.
There were strong views aired that experienced-based imagery was too abstract and didn’t work without a location.
Some of these voices were so passionate about branding and other tourism issues they teamed up with vocal former mayor Kevin Byrne to create their own tourism organisation, Cairns Tourism Industry Association.
New TTNQ boss Mark Olsen, who has hit the ground running since taking on the chief executive role less than three months ago, said yesterday the rebranding exercise would start to be seen in the market as part of an Outback tourism campaign mid next year and had been planned for years. Mr Olsen is right when he says it makes sense to sell the Cairns and Reef brand nationally after proving successful overseas, and talking to him yesterday, he was confident rainforest operators would embrace it as positively as those affiliated with the Reef.
That’s proven to be true already. Daintree tour operator Lawrence Mason reckons rebranding will work.
He toils among the other World Heritage-listed area in this unique region and understands the drawing power of Cairns and the Reef. Decades of hard work means both names are recognisable and desirable.
Mr Mason says priority one is getting them here. Then it’s about marketing all the amazing things visitors can do here.
A lot of hard work is going on across the industry and city to get tourism humming again, and there is optimism.
TTNQ knows though that success isn’t just about logos and monikers, and it is beavering away on more substantial ways to supercharge the industry.
There are also big efforts being made in the city to arm TTNQ with more funds to be able to do its job, and the airport is working through a hot list of 22 airlines to try and entice to the region.
Bring on 2020.