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Get
out the breeches and bonnets
History gets a hard
sell as marketers gear up for Jamestown’s 400th
anniversary
by
Lisa Antonelli Bacon
Virginia Business
January
2005
Colorado
has the Rockies, but Virginia has Richmond. Louisiana
may have New Orleans, but we’ve got the New World.
And long before Florida had Mickey, we had Martha, as
in Washington. If “oldest” equates to “most
significant” (as most Virginians contend when
speaking of anything), Virginia has more history to
market than any of the other 49 states.
That’s
not a stretch. As home to the first permanent English
settlement in the New World, Virginia is chapter one
in America’s history books. Virginians created
the first democratic legislature in the Western hemisphere.
The seeds of the American Revolution sprouted here.
And more Civil War battles were fought on Virginia soil
than any other. If there’s any doubt that Virginia
holds the greatest cache of American history, remember,
four of the country’s first five presidents were
Virginians.
The hospitality industry has been flogging Virginia
history for years. (Just try to count the number of
waiters and waitresses across the state sentenced to
work in breeches or bonnets.) Now the state is preparing
to beat the stuffing out of its history as marketers
gear up for a heavyweight historical event: the 400th
anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. As 2007 approaches,
be prepared to see a tsunami of tricorns, a slew of
sabers, a horde of American Indian headdresses and even
more Civil War re-enactments than usual as Virginia
marketers ramp up for the gold mine that they hope the
commemoration will yield.
A quadricentennial, after all, doesn’t come along
every day. In anticipation of large crowds, hotels in
the historic Williamsburg-Jamestown-Yorktown triangle
have undergone millions in renovations. In Richmond,
the venerable, Jefferson-designed state Capitol is sprucing
up with an $83 million restoration. If celebrity invitees,
including Her Majesty the Queen of England, attend some
of the special events, Virginia doesn’t want to
look shabby in what could be a glare of national publicity.
History is becoming an ever more important tourism niche
both here and around the country. With so many historic
sites, Virginia already is a leader in promoting its
heritage, and technology is providing new tools to tell
the story. But the competition for today’s tourists
is intense. With the growing number of options people
have for vacations thanks to the convenience of the
Internet, some historic destinations are seeing drops
in attendance and are looking for ways to be more interactive
and engaging to stay in the game.
Marketing history just right — with or without
the fanfare of a big event — is important because
travelers pack an economic punch. According to the Travel
Industry Association of America, they contributed $555
billion to the national economy in 2002. Last year,
Virginia hosted 35 million visitors, making travel and
tourism the fifth largest private-sector employer in
the commonwealth with 280,700 full-time jobs. With an
economic impact of more than $15 billion in 2003, the
industry provides 5.1 percent of Virginia’s gross
state product. So important has travel and tourism become
to the U.S. economy that in 2002 it ranked as the first-,
second- or third-largest employer in 29 of 50 states.
Surveys show that history attracts tourists. “The
top two reasons people travel are rest and recreation,
and scenic and historic sites,” says Bill Austin,
director of the History & Tourism Center at Shenandoah
University in Winchester. In addition, surveys commissioned
by the Virginia Tourism Corp. — the state agency
charged with promoting Virginia’s history —
find that heritage tourists, as they are called, stay
longer and spend more than other segments of the tourist
market. So it’s no wonder that states are trying
to lure them, particularly since the spoils include
billions of dollars in tax revenues.
In 2003, Virginia’s tourism industry generated
$2 billion in combined state and local tax revenues,
an 8.9 percent increase over 2002’s $1.8 billion.
By comparison the Massachusetts Office of Travel and
Tourism reported in 2002 that its $11 million investment
in tourism returned less than $1 billion in local and
state tax revenue. Pennsylvania recouped $2.4 billion
in revenue the same year, but it spent $38 million marketing
the state to travelers, more than two and half times
VTC’s annual budget of nearly $14 million.
One could argue that nearly every inch of Virginia bears
some historical significance. “You have the Colonial
Williamsburgs and the Mount Vernons, the Monticellos
of the world that everybody wants to see,” says
Austin. But, he adds, there are other sites around the
state connected to historical figures and events. As
the 400th Jamestown anniversary nears, savvy marketers
are digging up less known, even less savory history
than that found in school books in an effort to take
advantage of the trend toward historical tourism. For
example, the Distilled Spirits Council, a national trade
group, has put up $1.2 million for the excavation of
George Washington’s distillery near Mount Vernon.
Plus it has offered an additional $300,000 for a museum
on the site to be completed by 2006, just in time to
catch the Jamestown 2007 wave.
While Virginia arguably has the most history to market,
competition for travelers’ dollars is strong,
especially among states that recognize the dollar value
of the tourist trade. West Virginia, for instance, has
an aggressive matching grant-advertising program that
yields humongous tourism budgets. “Last year,
West Virginia had $43 million in the marketplace,”
says Alisa Bailey, executive director of the Virginia
Tourism Corp. and the former tourism commissioner for
West Virginia. “That’s what we have to compete
against.”
Still, when it comes to marketing heritage, Virginia
has been doing it longer than most — for nearly
80 years. The state’s first tourism ad campaign
debuted in 1927 in the form of pen and ink drawings.
Of the first six ads produced to beckon tourists, half
of them (St. John’s Church, Monticello and what
was then the unreconstructed site of Jamestown) were
renderings of historic sites. Since then, the state’s
tourism efforts have proved to be visionary. Take the
“Virginia Is for Lovers” campaign that began
in 1969. It spawned imitators globally, from “I
(heart) New York” to “Je t’aime Paris.”
Virginia marketing gurus have followed with other firsts.
Civil War trails and brochures first appeared in Virginia,
and other states were quick to follow. And, as with
the “lovers” campaign, the vision hasn’t
been limited to history. “A few years ago, we
were promoting places where you could stay with your
pet,” says Martha Steger, the public relations
director for VTC who has been pitching the state for
more than 20 years. Now, you rarely have to ask where
Fido is welcome. Pleasing travelers and their pets has
become an upfront selling point for hotels, motels,
campgrounds and even spas.
That kind of forward thinking has served Virginia’s
tourism industry well. After 9/11, when tourism fell
dramatically nationwide, Virginia Tourism Corp. addressed
consumers’ post-strike fears of mass transit by
promoting short driving trips that packed in as many
attractions per square mile as possible. Virginia’s
overall numbers dipped only slightly in 2001 and 2002
and, aside from the brief tremor of 9/11, have grown
every year since the state first began keeping records
in the1970s, says Steger.
Some historic sites, though, continue to see drops in
attendance, which one hospitality official credits to
a paradigm shift in the traveling American public. “The
American traveler once was very content to go to a quiet
museum where they could passively experience the exhibitions.
… People are no longer content to do that. They
want to be entertained,” says Tim Andrews, director
of public relations for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
While typically 2 million to 3 million people traipse
through the restored 18th century capital each year,
total paid admissions of 730,000 in 2003 were down from
the previous year. Paid admissions were expected to
come in at about the same level or below for 2004, although
Colonial Williamsburg was full during the December holidays,
Andrews says. While many historic sites are finding
ways to be more interactive with costumed interpreters
and touch-screen computer monitors, “there’s
no museum in the world that can compete with the multibillion
advertising and marketing budget of places like Disney,”
notes Andrews.
With communications technology expanding marketing opportunities
exponentially on an almost-daily basis, it’s hard
to stay in front of the pack. “Each person receives
about 3,800 messages a day,” says Bailey. “We
compete with TiVo, satellite radio, the Internet.”
Still, VTC may have found the bull’s-eye to penetrate
the market. “The reason we’re having such
success is that we’re fully integrated,”
Bailey explains.
“Fully integrated” means internally, focusing
all divisions — public relations, sales and marketing,
electronic marketing, advertising, and customer relations
— to carry a common message. It also means exhaustive
cross marketing. “What people need to realize
is that people who do heritage tourism are the same
people who do other things,” Steger says. “Heritage
travelers statistically go to the beach more often,
do more antiques shopping. But then beach travelers
do more of the heritage attractions than the average
traveler. Nothing stands alone.”
Consequently, VTC seizes on any opportunity to cross-market
directly and simultaneously to a variety of travelers.
For instance, of the various wine country vacation packages
VTC promotes, one is specifically devoted to “The
Thomas Jefferson Experience” and includes deluxe
accommodations at a hotel near Monticello and a driver
for visits to and from nearby wineries.
There is also what Bailey calls “guerilla marketing,”
the in-your-face approach of handing out brochures,
coupons or samples, providing yet another opportunity
to cross-market. Last October when the state announced
that Virginia was the first to have a statewide birding
and wildlife trail, Bailey’s people gave out samples
of birdseed in a package with the “Virginia is
for Lovers” Web site on it. The new trail includes
scads of historical locations and landmarks. “The
trail is another example of how history is integrated
into almost everything we do here,” says Steger.
In recent years, the cross-marketing of anything historic
has stimulated Virginia tourism across the board. Building
on other events has become almost reflexive for VTC
strategists. When the film “Gods and Generals,”
a Civil War epic filmed in Virginia, premiered in 2003,
VTC piggybacked on the event with electronic marketing
to travelers. “Requests for information on our
Civil War sites went up 80 percent,” says Bailey.
European countries have long milked “old”
and “historical” to draw visitors. But now
it is becoming even more than a marketing niche; it’s
becoming an industry unto itself. Shenandoah University
has raised the bar with the creation of its History
& Tourism Center. With $3 million in federal grants
as seed money, the university steered the center’s
development from its initial concept of a Civil War
orientation center into a broader concept in which an
academic center, high-tech exhibits and visitor information
on historical sites in Winchester and Frederick County
will be housed under one roof, connecting the region’s
historical sites and resources. “What we would
like to see at Shenandoah University is a full curriculum
in heritage tourism,” says Director Bill Austin.
For now, the center’s focus is education. Austin
terms heritage tourism as “the diamond in the
rough in our region. Our efforts previously have been
somewhat disjointed,” he notes. While many area
organizations promote history, an overall umbrella agency
is needed to plot strategy. “Winchester can’t
do it alone. Staunton can’t do it alone. Harrisonburg
can’t do it alone. But if you look at these areas
up and down the valley, they can create a total destination.
We think that the center is a vital resource to tie
these communities together for heritage tourism marketing.”
Having a comprehensive state strategy also is important,
says Dick Cheatham, president of Living History Associates
in Richmond, which provides costumed historical interpreters
for events. He says marketing should not only highlight
the state’s proud moments but should acknowledge
those once kept in the shadows. “It should be
more provocative,” says Cheatham.
The U.S. National Slavery Museum in Fredericksburg proposed
by former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder — Richmond’s
newly elected mayor — may fit that bill. The $200
million museum, which broke ground in 2003 and is scheduled
to open in 2007, would tell the story of slavery in
America through a variety of ways: the replication of
a slave ship, artifacts, a library, virtual reality
exhibits and a theatre. So far about $10 million has
been raised, including a $1 million pledge from actor
and comedian Bill Cosby.
For now, though, the state is concentrating on the 400th
anniversary of the arrival of the Jamestown colonists.
Leading the effort to coordinate the state’s role
in the quadricentennial is the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation.
As part of the 2-year salute that begins in 2006, archaeological
programs are being expanded, living history presentations
are being enhanced and there will be new reproductions
of the Godspeed and the Discovery, two of the three
ships that brought the first settlers.
But Jamestown isn’t merely the jewel in Virginia’s
marketing crown. In another example of smart marketing,
the foundation’s steering committee — made
up of representatives of state agencies, historical
organizations and the citizenry — mapped a shared-cost
strategy to get every whistle-stop with a shred of history
involved without the foundation having to foot the whole
bill.
The Jamestown 2007 Web site includes a five-step guide
for civic groups, local jurisdictions, even neighborhoods
to sponsor quadricentennial events or develop their
own under the Jamestown 2007 banner. With an extra $1.5
million earmarked for Jamestown 2007 over the next two
years, VTC hopes to raise awareness of the state’s
rich history among its citizens. “Nationally,
40 percent of tourism is people visiting friends and
relatives,” says Steger. “… So it’s
very important to have the citizenry informed in order
for them to be ambassadors for all the friends and relatives
to come.” By last month, 83 communities around
the state had signed on as official Jamestown 2007 communities.
That's 81 more than the number of corporate sponsors.
So far only two companies, Norfolk Southern Corp. and
one other that a foundation official wouldn't name,
have agreed to put up money.
Over the course of the 2-year commemoration, there’s
no telling how many tourists will land in Virginia.
Some will come for the history; others will golf and
go to the beach. A recent survey of guests (primarily
from the Northeast) who stayed at Kingsmill Resort and
Spa in Williamsburg posed this question: What’s
the first thing that comes to mind when you hear of
Williamsburg? The answer, says Kingsmill’s Managing
Director Joseph A. Durante III, was surprising. “Most
people said Busch Gardens.” That the nearby themed
entertainment park won out over Colonial Williamsburg
sparked a change in the resort’s marketing materials
with current brochures featuring more photos of golf
and Busch Gardens than earlier materials.
Perhaps that’s a portent. Don’t be surprised
if one day you see an illustration of John Rolfe in
a golf cart or riding a roller coaster.
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Business - January 2005 |
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