Visit London is the organization charged with marketing the city of London to the world. From the Olympics to the recession to terrorism, Visit London has to manage a range of media events and occasionally to cope with unpredictable crises, all the time trying to ensure a steady stream of visitors to the UK capital. These visitors are a major factor in the city’s economic success.
The company’s communications director, Ken Keller, was in the Middle East recently to speak at the Institute for International Research’s PR Congress. Communicate caught up with him to find out how London markets itself across the world, and how places like Jordan (see page TK) can do the same.

How do decide what aspect of a city is key to its branding?
That has been one of the key issues for London over the last few years, particularly with the Olympics coming up. You’re under pressure to suddenly be able to deliver a worldwide message to a global stage. So we’ve done a lot of work to look at what the London brand is, how we communicate that, and what it is that we want to say.
In London the conclusion we have come to is, in a way, London is whatever you want it to be. There have been lots of attempts to define London, whether through its history or modernity or through icons, but I think there’s been a lot in the last few years that has really focused on London as a world city – literally every country in the world has a citizen in London. The easiest thing to do was just let it breathe by itself. By just putting the word out there, people will understand what it means for them.
I think all destinations when they’re looking at their marketing strategies will try to find one or two things they think sums them up or is the USP or provides some way of distinguishing them. How are you really, distinctly different? Because, if everybody is talking about golf, everyone is talking about spas, everyone is talking about luxury, after a while these things can all blend into one. The challenge is really, how are you making yourselves unique in an area where a lot of people might be saying the same thing?

What’s the ultimate goal of destination marketing? Is it just altering people’s perceptions, or is it about driving visitor numbers?
It’s all about economic benefit. Our campaigns are measured on the amount of economic benefit that we managed to bring into the city as a result of those campaigns. So we’ve measured quite strictly, by questioning people who’ve come into contact with the visit London campaign. We survey people and say, “Why did you come to London? How much did you spend?” and so on, and we calculate the economic benefit from that. We have quite a rigorous way of working out our return on investment.

Does Visit London carry out much marketing in the Middle East?
We have quite a targeted way of looking at people in the Middle East, and it centers on trade shows. We don’t have enough funding to spread mass commercial advertising in the Middle East, China, and other emerging markets. So we tend to focus on the luxury market in the Middle East, through trade shows or through outreach for press trips. It’s quite a specific targeted approach at the luxury end.

You spoke at the PR Congress about crisis management. Is that an aspect of work that is common for destination marketing?
It certainly is for a place like London. Travel and tourism is a global industry, so it’s affected by global events. Whether they be wars, or things like SARS or swine flu; these things have a direct impact on how people feel about traveling, and the degree to which a destination is either directly or indirectly affected by those things can have an influence on how well your industry does. So it’s something that you become used to dealing with: providing reassurance, and making people feel safe about traveling. It’s quite a tricky area, because it’s down to how individuals feel about going somewhere.

So is safety now the main issue for marketing destinations?
Yes. We’ve done research on this, and people have very different mindsets, ranging from someone who says it “absolutely does not make a blind bit of difference to the way that I approach life; life is a risk and the whole world is a risk and I’m going to carry on doing what I do,” right through to another set of people at the other end who may well be put off by going to a specific place because of something that has happened there. So you have to deal with different mindsets all the time.
The solution is about projecting confidence. In London’s case the idea is of life continuing as normal, business as usual. You have to have very confident messages, and a lot of confident messages come from events, seeing crowds of people going about life as normal.
After the bombings in July 2005, for example, there was a very specific program in September of that year to put a large number of events together where a large volume of people were going to be seen in central London. Once you’ve got that up and running, you’ve got something that’s a counter projection to what those earlier images were. It’s about life going on as normal. You also have to lose a bit of the corporate-ness, you have to talk in very human terms. So when we’re doing interviews around that particular subject I always talk very personally about what I’m doing, because when you’re at a distance from something like that, all you ever see is the media images. You don’t really hear about real life, you don’t hear about everyday life, and you don’t hear about things continuing. Part of our job is to get that across.

What sort of things did you do after the July 2005 bombings to project this image of life continuing as normal?
That incident came the day after the Olympic win, so you had these complete contrasts between people in Trafalgar Square [celebrating] and then the bombings the day after. So one of the events a little later on was actually a recreation of that Olympic moment, giving that moment a little bit more time in the spotlight to counteract that negativity.

How has new media changed the destination-marketing picture?
That landscape is where everybody needs to be. We have a Facebook page, we’re on Twitter. All of the regular information about what’s happening in London is communicated through those channels. The next move for us is probably to see how we can start joining in the debate a little more?
Issues will come up, like a debate about whether the Olympics will be good for London or not. We had an example of that recently, and it provides an opportunity to start engaging in dialog about the city, which is not something that tourist boards are necessarily used to doing. It’s quite a corporate projection usually, but getting into the thick of some of those projections is something that we will have to do. One of the biggest moves for us was to put comments from guest-review site Trip Adviser next to the hotel listings that we have on our Web site.

Outside London, who’s doing the most impressive destination marketing right now?
I like what New York is doing. They are in some ways our direct competitors in terms of world cities, but they are also people that we have quite a lot to do with. What I like about them in particular is that the city has changed enormously in the last five or six years in terms of the product and what’s there and what it feels like to be there, and the streets, and crime, and everything. Also they’re using things like film extremely well. Things like Sex in the City and all these great things that are in mainstream entertainment and media are fantastic for projecting an image of the city as well.