EQ Up Close: Case Study Series - New Brunswick
In Marketing
From a marketing perspective, focus is on the three primary EQ types and a few niche opportunities where New Brunswick can succeed based on its offering and
a clear competitive advantage. The insights from EQ and layering in other relevant research has allowed for strong rationales in decision-making by the team. As
Kim Matthews states, "The benchmark created in 2011 allows us to see where we are making improvements and where we need to make adjustments to get the best
return on investment."
For example, TNB learned that the travel planning time is longer for Authentic Experiencers, which has prompted the team to adjust when to run campaigns for this
market. Overall, EQ has allowed the marketing team to lead and develop:
• An overarching Marketing and Sales Strategy
• A brand narrative that would appeal to specific EQ types and work across all channels
• An approach to assess, categorize and tag³ experiential tourism offerings
• An approach to assess, categorize and tag videos and images and develop content that
would appeal to their primary EQ types
• An approach to validate partnership opportunities, leveraging insights from PRIZM data
• Integrated campaigns to appeal and convert traveller types in key geographic markets and
niche products
"Every campaign we do, we go back to the EQ research and
analyze the data to determine if there are any new insights or
ways that we should be thinking of our potential guests."
Kim Matthews, Director of Marketing, Tourism Division,
Tourism New Brunswick
• Cost efficiencies, by choosing jurisdictions in geographic markets where a higher concentration of target EQ types are found
Focus group results in key geographic markets have shown that TNB's expression of its brand, 'The Unexpected is in our Nature,' resonates with its EQ types.
Developing a brand narrative that can be expressed either for No-Hassle Travellers or for Authentic Experiencers and Cultural Explorers was challenging, but was
accomplished by understanding specifically the values and motivations of the EQ types and aligning the product offering.
In Product Development
Based on its 2010-2013 Tourism Strategy, TNB had begun in early 2010 to develop an experiential tourism product development program called Inner Journeys. The
program was a starting point to understand how to evaluate, align and grow experiences based on EQ types. Experiences in the program required a 'hands-on' element
for the guest and within the first year there were a total of 145 experiences within the collection. For 2012, each experience has been tagged by EQ type for use in
marketing, trade and media opportunities.
TNB developed a full-day EQ workshop for industry that was delivered in six locations across the province over two months in early 2011, training close to 300 individual
tourism business operators. To make the information as relevant as possible, TNB developed customized materials on its primary EQ types layering in NB data,
developed group exercises using existing NB experiences, and provided worksheets and tools such as 10-steps for making EQ work at an operator level. Also among
the tools were video personas of the primary EQ types describing their travel to help both staff and industry understand the character of each type and what makes
each unique.
© 2012 Canadian Tourism Commission
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Tagging is the act of assigning a metadata description to a piece of content, image, video or artifact that helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching.
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