It’s been 5 years since we started our journey as an agency for DMOs. The first few years we spent a lot of time pointing out that there are new forms of marketing that are more effective and efficient. We’ve mostly passed the point where we had to convince marketers that they needed to re-examine their strategies, priorities and budget allocations. Those days are pretty much over. People understand.

We’ve now entered another challenging phase. Moving to where everybody knows we need to go by building an organizational structure and culture that supports the new way. Peter Drucker said it a long time ago “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

Here’s what I hear and observe

The impact on people

The challenge

New of shifting priorities means shifting budgets. Shifting budgets means stop or reduce specific activities. This often has an impact on people. New skills are required and some skills have become redundant. Not very many DMOs are willing to follow-through on priorities when it could impact someone’s employment. As a result, certain activities are maintained in order to avoid dealing with the impact on certain people or new priorities aren’t properly staffed because no new positions are created.

The impact

The impact of the above is a significant lag in the implementation of priorities. It also causes frustration amongst teams who are tasked with a big objectives without the capacity to implement. There are still DMOs where the digital team is tiny related to more traditional activities. All the while people with skill-sets that are in the process of becoming redundant are worried and stressed about the future.

The solution

You don’t need to fire anybody if you don’t want to (or can’t). You need to assess people’s skills and ambitions and reallocate your people within the organization. The fact is that you’ll probably need more staff to deliver results anyways. Media dollars are replaced with people dollars. It will require training. It will require change management.

And for staff that really doesn’t want to change you can assist them in finding a better suited job somewhere else. Working in an environment where you’re waiting for your job to become redundant is stressful. Even the people who want to change jobs often don’t pull the trigger out of fear. When managed properly you’ll do them a favour in the long run.

Outdated processes, policies and business models

The challenge

There are some really bizarre policies and processes out there. For example, I’ve spoken with DMOs who

1. have to spend a certain percentage of their budget on media.
2. have a cap on the number of full time staff or salary %.
3. have the requirement of partnership dollars where for example every dollar spent needs to be “leveraged” with another dollar from a partner.
4. use membership fees and/or pay-to-play to increase the DMO budget
5. excessive approval processes
6. RFP requirements for anything over $X

There are others but the principle is the same. I understand the intent behind all of them. But they were created in a different time. And in the present they can be incredibly limiting.

The impact

The result of the rules above are that

• DMOs are forced into the wrong priorities
• things are slowed down significantly or not done at all
• marketing becomes irrelevant or disconnected to the consumer

The impact of the specific challenges above

1. a minimum percentage dedicated to media buys automatically makes advertising a priority where it might not be
2. a cap on hiring slows down the acquisition of new capabilities and the implementation of new priorities
3. requiring partnership dollars steers a DMO towards partner priorities instead of destination marketing priorities
4. membership prioritizes members and sometimes excludes non-members, causing a disconnect with consumers
5. lengthy approval processes can slow things down too much
6. too strict RFP requirements can significantly slow down implementation, or force DMOs to use suppliers who aren’t best suited for the job (because RFPs are insanely time consuming)

 The solution

Most of the policies, processes and business models have a certain intent. The intent is usually

• avoid excessive overhead
• generate additional revenue streams or offset production costs
• create alignment with tourism stakeholders
• risk management
• avoid corruption

What’s required to make marketing work in 2015 is an evaluation of all these policies, processes and revenue models against the new strategy, tactics and requirements to achieve the same intent.

For example, avoiding excessive overhead needs different policies. My rule