2021-07-22
On July 22, 2021, the World Tourism Alliance Members’ Day 2021 organized by Harbin Municipal Bureau of Culture, Broadcasting, Television and Tourism, a member of WTA, was held in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China. Centering around the theme of “Festival Brands Building and City Tourism Development”, experts and scholars from the members of WTA including Harbin Municipal Bureau of Culture, Broadcasting, Television and Tourism, the School of Tourism Management at Sun Yat-sen University, UnionPay International, Spring Tour and Tuniu.com conducted interaction and communication with over 100 guests present.
On the WTA Members’ Day, Wang Shubai, Vice President of Tuniu.com, talked about the significance of festival branding for the construction of tourist cities and the construction logic of branded festivals, and, based on the cases of Tuniu, he also analyzed how tourism enterprises help the construction and development of tourist cities by creating city festival brands.
Sharers| Wang Shubai, Vice President of Tuniu.com
Prepared Based on Recordings | World Tourism Alliance
Good afternoon! I am Wang Shubai from Tuniu.com. My topic today is Promoting the Upgrading of Cultural Tourism Consumption and Empowering the Construction of Tourism Cities Through Festivals. The accelerated modernization can better cater to people’s longing for a better life. But now the contradiction of unvaried cities is getting highlighting. How to show the diversity of a city? How to make a city known and remembered by people? These are unavoidable problems in the image propagation of a modern city.
In China, some cities have come to the forefront of this field. The old influencer of Chongqing, the new top influencer Changsha and the rising star of Zhengzhou have made new advances or gotten popular. Concerning the meeting topic today, I would like to talk about how festivals can help tourism cities get further publicized.
Today, I’d like to talk from the following four aspects: First, let’s trace to the origin and clarify the differences and connections between traditional festivals and modern festivals. Second, let’s focus on two questions: 1. Why festivals become icons of modern cities, and what is the significance of festival branding; 2. How to build festival brands to empower the construction of tourism cities. Finally, let’s discuss how city-enterprise cooperation can stimulate the new momentum of festival branding.
First, let me talk about traditional festivals and modern festivals. In China, festivals have a long history and are deeply rooted in the masses. The traditional festivals feature weak regionalism and strong nationality. Why? On one hand, traditional festival activities are often attached to our traditional festivals. For example, in the Lantern Festival every year, the Lantern Show will be held all over the country. And when it comes to Dragon Boat Festival, all people are enthusiastic about participating in or watching Dragon Boat Race. On the other hand, traditional festival activities also rely on the unique customs of ethnic minorities. For example, the Dai Water-Splashing Festival, Mongolian Naadam Festival, etc., are representative festival activities of ethnic minorities in China.
In contrast, modern festivals present prominent regional features and obvious trends of festival making. Festivals have become a symbol of urban differentiation, and modern festivals, in most cases, are created by taking advantage of a city’s resource endowment, cultural connotation and tourism supporting measures, etc. Take Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival as an example. It is not a traditional festival, but created by Harbin based on the local ice and snow features. It is the same case for Qingdao International Beer Festival. Now, when talking about the beer festival, we will instinctively associate it with Qingdao, and the International Beer Festival has become a symbol of Qingdao varying from other cities.
Through the comparison between traditional festivals and modern festivals, we can find that festival resources are “rich ore” in tourism. “Promoting and revitalize tourism with festivals” has gradually become the consensus for the development of tourism cities, and celebrating and creating festivals have become the inevitable choice for the transformation and upgrading of tourism cities.
Second, I’d like to talk about the significance of building the festival brand. As a matter of fact, in foreign countries, special festivals have always been one of the most attractive icons of a city. When talking about foreign beer festivals, we usually connect it to Munich in mind. As for carnival, the Rio Carnival has become a household word. Of course, in recent years, the domestic festival activities have also gradually become numerous and branded, such as Nyingchi Peach Flower Festival, Moutai Town Moutai Liquor Festival, Jiangsu Xuyi Lobster Festival, and Hainan Island Carnival, etc.
Throughout the world, all modern festival brands are closely related to city culture and image. In terms of the definition and connotation of city icon, festival is one of the most important icons of a city. However, in order to make the most attractive icons of a city known, it is necessary to spread the festival as a brand.
Nowadays, it is quite common to see that “a festival makes a carnival in a city”. However, we should also take notice of the limitations of a single and independent festival, such as short cycles, weak experience and lack of sustained attraction.
Therefore, it is quite a time to build the festival brand! First, festival branding helps to overcome the limitations of a single festival activity. If a city tries its best to hold a festival, it may attract some attention and generate some benefits in the short term. However, one-off festival activities tend to expose the shortcomings of a city’s sustainable development strategy and supporting facilities. Festival branding means to hold festival activities in a targeted and regular way, with the purpose of shaping the lasting attraction and influence of the festival. In the end, it can make the dual harvest of both flow and income.
Second, festival branding is conducive to the all-round and multi-level display of local culture and attracting tourists to experience it in depth. Just like product brand, festival brand is an important way to deepen users’ impression and cognition.
Third, as mentioned above, the city image building, spreading and operation are increasingly dependent on various festival activities. Festival brands can not only highlight the city icon, but display the variety of the city.
Recently, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued the Cultural and Tourism Development Plan for the 14th Five-Year Plan Period, aiming to promote the in-depth development of culture and tourism integration, and further meet the new market demands for cultural and tourism products. Festivals, as a new form of cultural and tourism integration, will be more and more closely related to the construction of tourist cities.
Since festival branding is of great significance to the construction of tourist cities, next I’d like to discuss how to achieve the branding of festivals. To build a successful festival brand, the first consideration is how to attract tourists. At present, many cities are facing the embarrassing situation of “holding festivals without tourists visiting”. Why has the logic of “tourists will come naturally along with holding festival” become invalid? I think the major reason is that the behaviors and needs of tourists are changing dramatically.
At present, the behavior of tourists is characterized by multiple contact points, behavioral scenes, chain decision paths and rich attention forms, etc. Accordingly, the tourist demands are changed as follows: Tourists prefer to observe local customs, have higher demands for tourism quality, and have more diversified elements of tourism choice.
In order to deeply integrate into the tourism destination, the traditional sightseeing tour has turned into gourmet tour, shopping tour, holiday leisure and other new forms. The change of tourism form calls for higher requirements for tourism quality. Take gourmet tour as an example. Nowadays, tourists are not just satisfied with eating the featured delicious food of the destination, but also want to participate in and experience the process of making the food.
Tourists’ high requirements also boost the product categories in the market to meet the needs of personalized tourism. In general, changes in user behavior and needs lead to comprehensive upgrading of tourism products, tourism services, tourism marketing and tourism concepts, and will force tourism cities to accelerate brand upgrading.
Festival brand, as a city’s icon, is an important part of the city brand, and, naturally there is much to do about it. So what is the focus of festival branding? I think it is nothing more than understanding the characteristics of the festival brand and how to build it.
Mature festival brands are all regional, cyclical, cultural and experiential. The regionality has been mentioned many times before and I will not talk about any more. What is cyclicity? Cyclicity means that the festival brand activities are held in a certain cycle. If a city regularly holds festival activities for a long time, it will undoubtedly help to deepen the impression of tourists and promote their re-buying and re-visiting behaviors.
It is quite easy to understand culture and experience. Culture is the core element of festival tourism and also the deep reason to attract tourists. Meanwhile, modern festivals have set up experiential projects to increase the participation of tourists, thus deepening the brand image of the festival and even upgrading the brand image of city.
To be specific, how do achieve festival branding? In fact, it also follows the basic principles of product brand communication. As is well-known, brand communication needs to reach users through portfolio approaches, and constantly meets the new demands and new consumption of users. Generally speaking, to deliver the product and brand to the consumer, you need to make your product and your brand known by consumers, who can then buy your product when needed. Festival tourism, as a cultural tourism product, needs not just to make it known and bought by users, but to meet the diversified needs of tourism users and their pursuit of satisfaction.
In order to let tourism users know, buy and get satisfaction, the festival should dig into the city’s history, geography, folk customs, culture and other resources to efficiently build brand image in the minds of tourists. In the meantime, the festival cycle should be extended as long as possible, and the content and form of the festival should be enriched to enhance the sense of participation and satisfaction of tourists. In the non-festival period, the tourism-related supporting measures should be improved to attract tourists to return and get engaged in in-depth tour during the non-festival period.
Finally, I would like to talk about how tourism enterprises help to build the city festival brand. In recent years, Tuniu has focused on vacation and leisure tour, and made a series of brilliant achievements in destination marketing and satisfaction marketing. I will introduce some cases of Tuniu to present how tourism enterprises can successfully form destination marketing and satisfaction marketing campaigns by building city festival brands, so as to further promote the construction and development of tourist cities.
Destination marketing of Tuniu involves multiple links, such as product planning, activity execution, media communication, and big data application, etc. “Making travel easier” is not only Tuniu’s constant mission, but also our goal of destination marketing.
Take Hainan International Tourism Island Lingshui Youth Festival for example. To help build the brand of Hainan International Tourism Island Lingshui Youth Festival, Tuniu has planned and executed a series of festival activities, such as the water-sprinkling festival, bubble run, music festival, and pool party, etc., which attracted nearly 1,000 foreign young visitors from 46 countries and regions throughout the world, with the whole media exposure level up to 10 million.
In addition, in order to build the image of Xining as a west self-driving tourism city, Tuniu has helped Xining to hold the Forum of Self-driving Travel in Wester China, RV music festival and other festival activities in consecutive years. Tuniu has also joined hands with Gansu Culture and Tourism Bureau to hold a harvest festival, and launch a series of marketing activities such as “Harvest – Tour in Gansu” online and offline. Furthermore, in the China-ASEAN International Touring Assembly, Tuniu was also active in the activities closely related to many domestic and foreign tourist cities passed by.
Based on destination marketing thinking, Tuniu has also worked with tourism authorities in many European countries and regions to plan food festivals, shopping festivals and other themed activities according to different cultures of different countries, so as to strengthen the brand recognition of EU-China Tourism Year in the minds of Chinese tourists. Meanwhile, we also planned a series of activities such as Canada’s 150th anniversary, which contributed to the building of Canada’s national brand and national tourism image.
Nowadays, tourism destination marketing depends increasingly on new media technologies, especially the fission communication of social platforms. Among them, travel-related short videos are especially popular. The short video of Hongyadong in Chongqing has become popular, and the model of “destination marketing + network communication” has also been used for the popular spirit bowl (spirit for bolstering departure) throwing activity in Xi’an.
Tuniu has already created a systematic online marketing mode long ago. For example, the network communication of Aurora Borealis in Canada through Tuniu online brand pavilion has achieved a good marketing effect. For example, through Tuniu’s client sides such as WeChat, Weibo and Douyin (TikTok), large-scale exposure and publicity were carried out for destinations such as Northwest China and Chengdu. Interaction and efficient communication based on a large number of topics were carried out, which has also achieved good marketing effects.
In addition, Tuniu’s official live stream is also a normal application, which can help build publicity for tourism destination marketing. During the COVID-19 epidemic, Tuniu took users to overseas destinations without leaving home through live stream.
Tuniu also owns a professional video team, which can produce promotional videos for tourist destinations and show tourist destination brands.
On the basis of destination marketing, Tuniu has upgraded to create satisfaction marketing, and bring it into full play. Based on the satisfaction perception model, Tuniu has, from the perspectives of achieving user satisfaction, improving user experience, living up to user satisfaction, and creating user value, etc., constantly improved the satisfaction of tourism users, and constantly deepened the user’s awareness of the tourist destination and even brand loyalty.
Let’s study a case to show how Tuniu made use of festival resources and cooperated with Qingdao to complete satisfaction marketing. Search “Qingdao Beer Festival” on Tuniu.com, and we will see many related tour routes. Different routes integrate elements of different hotels, restaurants, scenic spots and entertainment in Qingdao. Based on different needs, tourism users can choose personalized and high-quality tourism products according to their needs to improve their travel experience. I think that’s what destination satisfaction marketing is all about.
That’s about it. Thank you for your listening!