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FYI is your source for the latest news and information about tourism and marketing from here at home and around the world. Please feel free to download and print any of the articles contained in this section.
- The Reinvention of City Places
- Marketing Basics for Interpretive & Heritage Sites and Attractions Part 3
- How to Include Green Requirements in Meeting Planning RFPs
- Marketing Basics for Interpretive & Heritage Sites and Attractions - Part 2
- Top 10 Best Green Practices for Meeting Planners
- Marketing Basics for Interpretive & Heritage Sites and Attractions
- How to Keep Your Website Interesting and Visitors coming back
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Defining a Small Town’s Differential Advantage
Potential customers often are faced with a wide range of alternative products, all very similar to each other. It is the marketer’s job to create in the customer’s mind an idea that a particular product is different in an important way, so that the product will have a competitive edge over others in the marketplace. This uniqueness or competitive edge is what is known in the marketing field as a differential advantage.
In the context of community development, it is the job of the community leaders to persuade potential tourists, residents, and outside businesses that your town is unique--or has a differential advantage--in a way that could be important to them in their decision of where to visit or where to locate. This creation of a differential advantage could turn out to be the deciding factor for a family considering where to spend their next vacation. It could influence a family who is thinking of moving to another community, or it could steer a business to locate in your town over other towns which don’t appear to have anything unique to offer. In cases where other towns offer similar features, if your community leaders have created a differential advantage in the potential customer’s mind, your town is more likely to win out.
A marketing strategy is designed to create and nurture a differential advantage. “The Four P’s” of the marketing mix could be—product, place, price, and promotion—or power, passion, perception, persuasion. Either way they form the center of marketing strategy.
In marketing a town, the various features of the town itself become the product. The concept of the town as a product encompasses the town’s scenery, natural resources, friendly atmosphere, transportation routes, history, architecture, educational facilities, shopping areas, and much more. All of these aspects help to determine the individual character of a given town. Often, some of these features will be unique to that town alone but they can sometimes characterize an area of the country as well. For towns on Vancouver Island, an advantage often cited is the excellent climate. This feature helps to make towns on Canada’s West Coast different from those in other parts of the country.
Place refers to the physical channel--for example, a grocery store or a lumber company- through which a product is sold. For some marketers, selection of the outlet through which the product will be sold can have a major impact upon the ultimate success or failure of the product in the marketplace.
When we speak of price as an element of a community’s marketing mix, we are referring to costs that the community imposes upon residents, tourists, and resident businesses for the privilege of carrying out activities in the town--cost of living, taxes, transportation costs, value of real estate, etc. Often, small towns have distinct price advantages over other locations. These price advantages can become an integral part of a town’s marketable uniqueness.
Finally, differential advantages of product and price must be promoted effectively. Essentially, promotion is communication, and community leaders must communicate the message of their town’s uniqueness to prospective customers. Reaching the right audience is often the most difficult task, because promotion costs money and most small towns are constrained by a tight promotional budget, but a low-cost promotion program can be effective if it is well-conceived.
In review, community leaders are engaged in marketing a complex product--their town. Principles of marketing tell us that community marketers should develop and nurture a differential advantage for their product, based on the uniqueness of the product itself and the price of the product. This differential advantage must then be promoted to a target audience within applicable budget constraints. Though the steps in developing and carrying out a marketing plan can be time-consuming, they can pay off in the form of a broadened economic base for your community.