B.T.B. contracts new marketing agency to promote Belize
With new faces at the top in the Tourism Ministry, there are also changes in the marketing strategies of the Tourism Board. B.T.B. revealed today that it has contracted the U.S. based firm of B.V.K. Advertising and Public Relations Firm to market Belize in the United States as a prime tourism destination. B.V.K. takes over from the Richartz Fliss Clark and Pope and is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And according to the B.T.B., the new firm is expected to take tourism arrivals to another level.
Duane Moody, Reporting
The Belize Tourism Board and industry stakeholders were present today at the launch of BVK as the industry’s new partner in marketing. Another firm, L&E International, was also contracted as the fulfillment house to distribute tourism information in the U.S. and Canada.
Shakira Oxley-Tsai, Dir., Marketing & Public Relations, .B.T.B.
“As you probably heard through this morning’s presentation, we’ve had a PR agency for the past ten years and with a new government, a new way of thinking, a little bit more research was done as well and so the public sector together with the private sector thought that it would be a good idea for us to refresh the image internationally and pretty much have a newer face for Belize in the international community. So there was a series of proposals that were submitted and they came to Belize, made a couple presentations together with the private and public private sectors. A decision was then taken that BVK are the ones who are best qualified to be able to take Belize tourism to the next level.”
Jan Frank, Senior Account Supervisor for B.V.K.
“B.V.K. will be marketing the country of Belize in the U.S.A. as well as Canada. We’ll be using publications such as Caribbean Travel and Life; a lot of publications that target the traveler that is interested in Belize. Early mainstreamers, scouts and pioneers, those are our audiences that we’re looking at to bring them to Belize because they are interested from the research that we did.”
David Kelly, Vice President of Media Services for B.V.K.
“Yes, in our travel survey we talked about to sixteen thousand people online and we found that there were four distinct groups; the scouts which is about five percent of the population, the pioneers which is about seven, seven and a half percent of the population, a group we call early mainstreamers who were roughly about thirty-six percent and the remaining fifty percent or so were the mainstream population. What we had found were the scouts are the people who want to come to a country for the first time and Belize would be perfect and I’m sure a lot of them have already been because they wanted to explore, look at the Mayan temples, go into the rainforest, things like that.”
B.V.K. intends to significantly target the early mainstreamers who are expected to increase the profitability within the tourism industry in Belize.
David Kelly
“But then where we really saw the potential were the early mainstreamers. Originally, when we asked about Belize and their potential incoming, about nineteen percent said they would because they didn’t know much about the country. What happened is once we described, in that paragraph that you saw about the country, that number jumped to seventy-five percent of the early mainstreamers; yes I’d like to take a look at Belize as a possible destination. So we feel because that target is so much larger at the nine point nine, almost ten million households in the U.S., there’s much potential there but not to say we’re going to ignore the pioneers or scouts either.”
Duane Moody
“How soon do you expect to see a change in the tourism industry here in Belize?”
Jan Frank
“I wish I could tell you it would be tomorrow but we will be starting our magazine ads running in mid November and December so hopefully we’ll see some changes early next year in the high season.”
The stakeholders in the industry are hoping for an increase in tourist arrivals by both cruise ship and air to top the current numbers. Reporting for News Five, Duane Moody.
B.V.K. is known for its advertising campaign of the Dominican Republic and Canada. Last year, over eight hundred and seventy-five thousand tourists visited Belize.
