7 Growth industries characteristics, part 1

You´ve probably heard of them, those successful companies that comes out of nowhere and reach the stars in the wink of an eye. Or the slow but steady ones that step by step grows from a small start-up to a profitable corporation more or less unaffected by seasonal fluctuations or recession times. How do they do it?

There are some characteristics they have in common. I thought I´d point out some of the most important ones in a short series of 7 advices, since these seems to be followed in many businesses, but for some reason not within tourism.

1. You need a focused product portfolio to clearly defined clients.
It´s looks like an axiom, but it´s quite common that tourism businesses are offering more or less “everything to everybody”. People coming to a destination are served a smorgasbord of activities. Especially when public institutions like municipalities or tourism information centres are responsible for the marketing (of attractions they don´t own), marketing tends to be general where brochures, ads and websites are presenting whatever there is to do and see at that place.

If you are a supplier of tourism experiences within such a system, you´re out of control. If you´re lucky, enough guests happens to find your services interesting. But you never know. To grow, you have to be in charge of your marketing and develop your product portfolio to a clearly defined target group. Thus, you learn how to provide improved services over the years for their specific needs and what kind of marketing information that works.

Check out Nomadic Journeys, for example. They´ve build a whole tourism industry over the past 15 years. In a third world country far from the beaten tracks, Mongolia. From being a small tourist guide provider they are now an international well known incoming tour operator and destination management company with a distribution network in 26 countries. How did it happen?

They developed a series of tours, tailor made for certain target groups:

Fishing tours are sold by fishing tour operators and marketed in sport fishing magazines. Trekking tours are sold and marketed through trekking companies worldwide. Adventure tours are distributed by… well, you get it.

They are now building a new multi-million-dollar hotel to meet the demand they´ve created themselves. In a country where there´s no public funding and getting a bank loan is a nightmare.

The key here is the packaging and distribution for clearly defined clients. So is pricing. Which we´ll talk about next time.

/ Curt Landin