Marketing for Dummies
September 23rd, 2006Several months ago this website approached Southport’s Pleasureland and requested some photographs for a free listing on this site.
Two weeks later we received a couple of photographs that could be politely described as amateurish. That was it. There were no invites to come and visit the attraction, no words of thanks for the free listing, nothing but a couple of crappy photos.
Earlier this month Pleasureland closed permanently, blaming competition from publicly-funded attractions and competition from Sunday shopping and sporting events.
Perhaps the owners need a basic lesson in marketing. Had they invited us to look around we would have made videos of the attraction and included them in our site, allowed them to use our site for press releases, etc. etc. We’re not pretending for one minute that this could have saved Pleasureland, but if they’d applied the same marketing techniques across the board they might just have seen some positive results.
Time and time again we see tourism businesses go bust. They all share a couple of common characteristics. The first is a distinct lack of interest in marketing themselves, even when it’s free. The second is blaming external factors when things go wrong.
Look at yourselves. It might just help.
September 23rd, 2006 at 3:49 pm
It is more than likely that they knew they were going to close, so didn’t think it was worth advertising
September 23rd, 2006 at 3:57 pm
We approached them in April. The advertising offer was free i.e. nothing to lose. Are you suggesting they dug out a couple of amateurish photos rather than send decent ones?
If you spend millions on a ride you’d think they’d be able to splash out a few hundred on some decent press photos.
September 23rd, 2006 at 11:43 pm
The decision was taken in March (at least) to close.
September 24th, 2006 at 12:08 am
Even if the decision was taken in March I believe it would have been confined to the upper management and owners. I don’t believe the marketing staff would have known.
Even if they did, they still had 6 months to try and turn things around. They couldn’t be bothered to write a decent email and type the words ‘Thank you’. This for me, says it all about this organisation and why it failed.