6. Conclusion
6.1. Insights
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6. Conclusion
6.1. Insights
Branding. The architecture of It’s More Fun in the Philippines as a campaign, wholly encapsulated “fun” as a defining value for the Philippines as a destination. No other taglines, as of the creation of the campaign, promises the value of “fun”. By setting this unique value proposition, the campaign was designed to standout among its peers. In an industry where everyone is promoting beautiful sceneries, safety, and well-known tourist spots, it was a challenge to come up with a unique proposition. It was also strategic for the agency to come up with a campaign that is true to its form, does not promise measurable values such as beauty, community, and warmth. These are values that can serve as enough hook, if implemented wisely, and encourage the audience to request more information, and ultimately, lead them to travel to the Philippines.
It was also important to mention that by mixing international and local tastes, the campaign is designed to avoid either target marktet to be alienated. Putting too much local imagery and the international market might not resonate with it well, and might feel that it’s too foreign. Putting too much international imagery and the campaign loses the identity of the values of the Philippines as destination.
According to Harris, the tourism industry is a competitive one. But the biggest challenge is to be able to portray, represent, and sell the values that define a destination, and that there can be can only be much that can be portrayed in a single brand. Financially, it was also a smart decision to run the campaign through crowd-sourcing, capitalizing on the ability of social media to reach more people, and by enabling the tourists themselves to be messengers themselves.
The position of the campaign as a people-centered one works well with Philippines, as it is one of countries with the wide-range use of social media. Ultimately, the branding strategy capitalized and was designed to work well with the product: to promote the best values the Philippines can offer, and to communicate it in a way that it will stand out.
Brand Imagery. It was established that It’s More Fun in the Philippines as a branding strategy works well with the product. As seen on the themes that are presented on the previous chapter, the same imagery is portrayed on most of the TVCs and related video materials. Quirks are still portrayed with beauty and warmth as a background. This was reflected with the visual
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and sound elements. All of the values that are pointed out in the Branding strategy (through the associative neural network) are aligned.
The TVCs were not only able to portray descriptive elements (blue sea, mountains, beaches) but also relational and emotional affects. This is similar campaigns such as “It’s More Fun in the Philippines – Intro,” “Wake up in the Philippines, ” and “Anak” TVCs.
However, it can be pointed out that most of the TVCs, while still relating to the It’s More Fun in the Philippines overarching campaign, often do not mention it. Such as in the case of “Wake up in the Philippines” and the “iTravel Pinas” campaigns, there were no strategic and apparent usage and mentioning of the overarching campaign. This makes it seem that these campaigns are stand alone ones. Moreover, the said non-use are reflective in the Department’s websites and channels – for example, “Wake up in the Philippines” has its own website separate from the main campaign website. This posits a problem because it was the intention of the “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” to be a banner and overarching campaign.
Brand Image. Based from the results, it was found out that geolocations are often used albeit the numerous duplication e.g City of Manila vs. Manila City vs. Manila. As for the photo elements, it was found the the most reoccuring theme in the photos are scenic and natural formations – particularly water formations such as sea, beach, bay, ocean, etc. There is a high tendency that if someone will post about their travel in the Philippines, it will be a photo of a water formation. This can be pointed out to the fact that most of the famous travel destinations in the Philippines are beaches, islands, or near bodies of water. This is in contrast to travel destinations featuring land forms or man-made structures.
As for the captions, it was found that people tend to be more expressive than descriptive.
People tend to be more sentimental and communicative when writing their posts. Thus, the feedback on a destination, is expressed through symbols (hope, paradise, beauty) and feelings (calm, enjoy, happy). This is also reflective on the use of emojis as the main theme that emerged is Feelings (used 99 times) compared to Nature (used 64 times). As for the hashtags, three top themes emerged: Philippines, Adventure, and Location-based descriptives.
Misalignment. As can be derived from the previous sections, it seems that the “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” is aligned with the intention (Branding) and execution (Brand Imagery). The only problem, as reflected in the data, is that the attributes of fun, warmth, and
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These three reasons point out to one thing: the brand’s concept of fun is not reflected in the current brand image.This can be attributed to several things:
1. The concept of fun, in itself is broad and multidimensional. The reason why “fun”
as an attribute cannot be found on the hashtag pool or caption-word pool is that people have different definitions and expression of fun and having fun. Case in point is that “fun” was only used twice as a hashtag. Synomyms such as entertaining, enjoyable, happy, were also not used. Ultimately, the non-use of “fun” as a hashtag does not indicate non-fun experience in the Philippines – it might just be because the word fun was expressed in other form or way.
2. The official hashtag, #ItsMoreFunInThePhilippines was only used 60 times. This means that only 60 people out of 200 used it. This may be because there is no motivation for the original poster to use it. Some of the video campaigns do not even reinforce the use of the hashtag, which can explain as to why majority does not use it, or are unfamiliar with it.
3. In relation to the first point above, the concept of fun cannot be easily captured in photo. Especially in capturing photos like of the Philippines, the tendency for an original poster is to use a scenic imagery instead. Even depictions of activities does not necessarily denote fun, but rather in-action moments.
4. Lastly, the value proposition of the Philippines as a destination might be too many.
As mentioned in the associative neural network, there are many values that were planned to be associated with the Philippines, but there are only few values that a tourist can resonate to.
Social media as a tool. The Department of Tourism’s use of social media has been sucessful in terms of getting the word out there. Social-media ran crowd-sourced marketing cmapaigns have been proven to be more far-reaching and cheaper in terms of scope. However, as seen in the study, using social media as a tool merits the correct way of using it. If the goal is to expand visibility, but still control it by consolidation, the deparment should be able to utilize the segments of a post well e.g. by reinforcing the banner campaign hashtag, or encourage the use of phots that depict “fun” moments. Effective use of social media assets should also be benchmarked with that of the industry peers.