Defining DMOs

Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) are now playing crucial roles in travel and tourism development, crisis management, economic development and more. Join Rob Levine, President of Marriner, and Shannon Gray, CEO of Gray Research Solutions, as they discuss the history of DMOs and their shift from purely marketing-focused efforts to managing the overall visitor experience.

TRANSCRIPT:

ROB: You know, we really do consider ourselves, you know, really lucky to be able to work with Maryland Office of Tourism Development and absolutely as well as the folks that discover Baltimore County. The idea of, you know, these guys have from a DMO perspective.

Their role like really is evolving. They're having to become, you know, more and more savvy from a marketing and from a leadership perspective. Like what are you seeing in the work that you do? What are some, you know, best in class examples of that evolution?

SHANNON: That's a great point. You know, to understand this trajectory, you kind of have to understand a little bit about the history of DMOs.

In about the 50s and 60s, these organizations started popping up, funded on bed tax. Bed tax is when you stay in a hotel overnight and you pay a little couple extra dollars, that money usually goes either to fund the city's general fund or to fund these kinds of organizations, destination marketing organizations. And in the beginning, they weren’t called DMOs and CVBs. They were just marketing. And the roles in the local government were very siloed.

In DMO marketing, you stay in your lane, you're in charge of marketing and that's it. I don't wanna hear anything about residents, I don't wanna hear about economic development, you're not tourism, you're marketing. And then you'd have the economic development organization that was in charge of attracting business to the local municipality. And then you'd have the chamber that's working with usually small businesses that are already in existence and you have the city for local government and all of these things.

What's happened recently, is a little bit of a blurring of the lines of these roles. And so DMOs are, which traditionally were just on marketing, have now kind of shifted into, well, we're not really just marketing. We're kind of now moving into more destination management. And one of the reasons is the marketing arm speaks to, communicates about, this place to the public. So if anything goes wrong, if there is a bad media story, if there's a natural disaster, the DMO kind of naturally steps into that role to help. They also are like, you know, for instance, for product development, product development in tourism means…we really need a fine dining restaurant, our visitors are telling us we're missing this restaurant. We need this puzzle piece to complete the visitor experience. And, hey, guess what? We found out that our residents actually would really appreciate a fine dining restaurant too. So in the past, you know, stay in your lane, you're not to talk about residents or what residents want, that's not your job. But it makes sense that a product or an attraction or an amenity in a place, would be attractive to both visitors and residents.

There's this very famous quote by a wonderful woman named Mara Gaste. And she's very kind of famous in our industry for saying, for talking about the blurring of the lines between tourism and economic development. If you build a place where people want to visit, you build a place where people want to live. If you build a place where people want to live, you build a place where people want to work. If you build a place where people want to work, you're back to building a place where people want to visit. It all starts with the visit. And that kind of changed the way that we all look at our professions. We're not just about marketing. We're leading the destination to economic success, through bringing folks to the destination. A lot of times you'll bring somebody to the destination, they'll visit there, you know what, I could really see myself living here.

ROB: You know, Shannon that reminds me of that Mercer management study that we cite a lot when we're working on strategy with clients, which Mercer had kind of looked at brand value over time. Right? So really academic stuff, but what's the brand value over time? And for brands that aligned their operations and their brand messaging, brand growth is exponential. Right? So the way is like how the destination is experienced, either as a place to live, a place to work, and or a place to visit, if you don't have that stuff right, just having an old school CVB or DMO talking about how great it is, if you don't have the fine dining restaurant, if you don't have a walkable downtown, if you don't have the destinations lined up, brand value actually decreases over time.

SHANNON: Yeah, because the things that a visitor wants to do are a lot of times the same thing that a resident wants to do, which is the same thing that a worker wants to do. You want to build your workforce, you want to build your resident base, you have to start with tourism. Nobody moves to a place or moves a business to a place without having visited there first. So your visitor experience, what you offer in terms of a visitor experience becomes critically important. It's not just about marketing. It's about the future of your destination. It really, really is. And so we've now moved to the, everybody calls it a DLO, it's destination leadership. So now we're taking the role of leadership and getting a lot of very successful DMOs are getting a seat at the table, as we like to say, in governance and in economic development. And that's a really exciting time to be in the tourism industry for sure.

ROB: Thanks for watching. Visit Marriner’s blog for the next video in our destination tourism series.