Ontario Culture Days’ Departure Lounge  |   Episode 5: Marketing (the relationship between) Arts, Culture, and Tourism

Transcript

[INTRO MUSIC]

[Shawn Newman]

Hello! Welcome to the Ontario Culture Days’ Departure Lounge, an audio course podcast designed to teach you about the ins and outs, and the trends and pitfalls of cultural tourism in Ontario. I am your host, Shawn Newman speaking to you from Tkaronto.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt devastating blows to the arts and culture sectors, as well as tourism. And now, two years in, we are seeing leaders from both industries coming together in new and innovative ways as they work toward recovery and rebuilding. This audio course, produced by Ontario Culture Days, is one way that we hope to support collaboration between these sectors, and to close the gaps between to them.

You might think that gaps between the tourism and the arts and culture sectors seems odd, and we agree! But there are fundamental differences in how these sectors work, even though they have so much in common. Throughout this series, we’ll explore the ideas at the core of cultural tourism, connect these concepts to the arts, and hear from professionals on the ground.

This podcast on cultural tourism is geared towards arts and culture sector workers and organizations and is designed as an audio course. But we certainly invite everyone to listen and learn with us! This podcast, its transcripts and the resources referenced are all available on the Ontario Culture Days website. Whether you are new to thinking about or working with Ontario’s tourism sector, or feel like you want an inspirational refresher, Ontario Cultures Days’ Departure Lounge has something for you.

In this fifth and final episode, we’re going to talk about marketing the relationship between the arts and culture sector and tourism. As always, we’ll begin by introducing a few definitions, making important distinctions, and highlighting trends of interest. We’ll then talk about some of the ways to effectively market that relationship. And as with the previous three episodes, in the second half you’ll hear us talking with tourism professionals, social entrepreneurs, and arts and culture folks that are doing exciting work on-the-ground. We hope that in hearing directly from them, you’ll not only be inspired to engage with the tourism sector but also see how the ideas that we’re introducing you to can extend into your own work.

In addition to this podcast, we’ve compiled resources and stories about cultural tourism and the innovative ways that people and organizations are working collaboratively across sectors, across communities, and even across the globe. This podcast and the resources that we discuss are all available on the Ontario Culture Days website.

In September 2021, an estimated 6 million visitors flocked to Paris over a 16-day period to see its famous Arc de Triomphe beautifully wrapped up in light textile, an artistic installation imagined by the late Christo and Jeanne-Claude. According to the Paris Tourism Office, one million of those visitors cited the installation as the primary motivator for the visit, which is said to have injected 235 million euros into the local economy.^[1]

Those are big numbers, obviously. Regardless of how much similarity, if any, the market in which you operate shares with the City of Lights, one thing remains: art and culture’s incredible drawing power. As discussed in the previous episode, cultural attractions are powerful and increasingly sought-after, especially those that are ephemeral and can only be appreciated from up close—like a gigantic, textile-wrapped monument.

Now, no need to go wrapping local landmarks here! A temporary exhibit, a one-off concert or annual festival, a pop-up craft market, are all smaller cultural attractions that carry both novelty and urgency, which tourists are still likely to respond to. In tourism lingo, the decision to position cultural attractions as unique opportunities is known as “eventification,” and it’s one of the different marketing strategies used in cultural tourism.

Cultural tourism is a fairly recent concept. In its infancy, the term was used to describe the influx of baby-boomers interested in monuments, heritage sites, and museums. And while boomers are still the largest demographic of cultural tourism, we increasingly have to account for both Millennials and Gen Z, who are said to crave authenticity and experience. They still want to learn, but they’d rather do it by doing, by being active and creative, instead of passively observing.

Also, boomers (maybe because of their age) like to travel in groups, whereas younger demographics don’t mind solo adventures. How you price and position your attractions, but also how you craft your value proposition—which we talked about in Episode 3—should reflect those preferences. However, it’s important to also stay true to your organization’s values. If your marketing doesn’t operate in ways that are aligned with your values, people will see that. And this frequently gets interpreted as being inauthentic.

It might be obvious, but it’s still worth stating outright: a strong online presence is an important start—prospective visitors should be able to find you. We talked about discoverability in the last episode. But you also need to develop a strong social media game: Facebook and Instagram for starters, but also YouTube and even TikTok when deemed relevant. Consider the image that your organization and your specific products—or attractions—project. How can you best communicate about the experience you’re offering? What’s the story? How can potential tourists see themselves reflected in what you’re trying to sell them? Even better, why not invite a vlogger, blogger, or influencer to document their experience in a style and tone that may be more “conducive” with your target demographics?

Generally speaking, cultural tourists tend to be well-educated, comfortable with technologies, rather affluent, and frequent travellers. From an economic impact standpoint, they typically spend more time at a destination, and also spend more money during their trip. From an experience standpoint, cultural tourists are said to be craving contact with the local community, to have a genuine interest in better understanding its culture and customs, and to be more willing to make other smaller or short trips in the attractions’ vicinity.^[2]

That suggests a range of implications for marketing. How does your attraction cater to those needs, specifically when it comes to connecting with locals and learning about them in an active, genuine, and non-extractive way? Recall one of the central tenets of regenerative tourism—attractions should be developed in collaboration with the community. This not only generates revenue for the community, but also empowers the community to be an active participant in determining the development of tourism in their own region towards preventing exploitation for tourism development. For the tourist, this kind of collaboration also enhances authenticity.

Moreover, by collaborating with community and other organizational partners, you can develop attractions and packages that span a few days. And this is very much in line with the concept of slow tourism that we introduced in Episode 1. So, you’ll want to know who else is in the same cultural tourism space as you—not because you compete with them, but rather because tourists are likely to engage in several cultural attractions. That’s good news for attractions outside of metropolitan areas: motivated, affluent visitors will go out of their way if what you have to offer speaks to their needs and interests.

This also implies a form of active curation of cultural attractions, in which arts organizations and tourism boards should work closely to identify underrated or undervalued places that hold potential for tourism.^[3] If you think of yourselves as cultural curators, you might begin to see your role as a trusted guide for tourists seeking to experience and understand your community. Cultural tourists prefer authenticity to commodity, exclusiveness to mass tourism, and welcome the opportunity to step outside of the traditional circuits to explore unique, real, hand-picked attractions.

There are many threads that we’ve been weaving together throughout this series. Some of them are going to re-appear here, as we close the loop on some of the ways that the arts and culture sector, and the products and attractions in it, are uniquely positioned to not only participate but be a leader in regenerative tourism.

Let’s zoom out from the Ontario context to get a bigger, national picture from Beth Potter, President & CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada. She talked to me about stories, and certainly, marketing is about storytelling. But also, she points to opportunities that we in Ontario might consider focusing on.

[Beth Potter]

The opportunity for us to better market the ‘Canadian story’, Canadian art and culture globally, is something we’re always looking to do as an industry. We are different, we are unique, we have a unique story to tell. There is somewhat of a lack of awareness on the world stage for just how much Canada contributes culturally, compared to places like Italy or France where you always think about art and culture.

We do have a long cultural and artistic heritage and particularly within our Indigenous communities. We want to do a good job at making sure we bring those stories to the forefront.

[Shawn]

And of course, arts and culture are about storytelling.

In our last episode, Kate from Explorer’s Edge talked about how arts and culture’s focus is expression whereas tourism’s focus is commerce. Here’s more of my conversation with her where she explains how these are not actually at odds, but rather complement each other. And in fact, she makes it very clear how central the arts are to creating a sense of place, and how creating arts and culture products that draw on local settings also enhances the artistic experience.

[Kate Monk]

Whether we’re talking about tourism product, or we’re talking about expression, the likelihood is in our region – which we call The Great Canadian Wilderness Just North of Toronto – in both those instances, in the commercial product side and then in the arts expression side, they are both going to, at some point, feature heavily the natural landscape, in a rural destination.

For our destination, the natural landscape is the biggest product. It is the biggest draw for people. That is the first thing they think of. In fact, that’s why we brand the destination as The Great Canadian Wilderness Just North of Toronto: we want to signify very quickly, if you head just north of Toronto, you can have a very quintessential, iconic Canadian wilderness experience.

Algonquin Park over to Georgian Bay for a UNESCO-designated biosphere – all those things that one would associate with a real interaction with the natural landscape, including just lying on a dock, it’s here.

The artists in a rural destination will weave that, probably whether they even know it or not. The greatest example of that would be the Group of Seven. I can give you another example: the artwork itself and the crafting, will often feature the sunsets or the landscapes or whatnot. But even a concert hall like the Charles W. Stockey Centre for the Performing Arts on Georgian Bay in Parry Sound, they are home to one of Canada’s most popular summer classical music festivals: The Festival of the Sound. They will time their concerts so that the intermission takes place when these legendary sunsets are going down on Georgian Bay, on the patio outside the concert hall. So, there’s always this interaction of the landscape in some way.

The group of seven would be the most interesting case point of that because it started with artists learning to interpret and to bring back information to the rest of Canada about what they saw in Algonquin Park and points north. But then it flipped now to where tourism people will say, “well, how do we have people experience the Group of Seven who aren’t painters?” So, you can go out and explore where they painted by going in a canoe. You can go on a guided tour that somebody will say, “well, this is where Tom Thompson painted this,” or these types of things. So, there’s this sort of always an interaction that the landscape is the product, but the landscape is also the expression.

That’s bridging the sort of way we can communicate with people in the arts and culture sector – to see those similarities. The other thing that is very interesting is when you’re in a – it’s not like an urban centre where things can be quite concentrated, where there’ll be a theatre district – here it’s very spread out – space, wilderness, distance! But it also means once again, you will find products based on the landscape uniquely.

[Shawn]

These examples from Kate aren’t directly about marketing, but instead demonstrate how our attractions benefit from intentionally incorporating place into our work. This also then makes it easy for tourism marketers to promote our sector.

Marketing tourism is all about creating a sense of place, and the easier we can make it for tourism marketers, the better. For example, think back to Tova Arbus from Fringe North and what she said in episode three about the ways that lacking clarity of purpose impacts marketing. Here it is again.

[Tova Arbus]

The reputation of what a fringe festival is far outpaced where we were at as a festival – and I mean that by reach and engagement, I mean that by our own capacity as a team. We tried to do way too much!

So then when we would reach out to tourism agencies and try to engage and say, “hey, we need you so people will come to our festival,” they weren’t sure what we were doing. That didn’t translate well for them to be able to pay it forward. So, they’re just telling folks, “Well, there’s a festival, it’s arts-based and here are the dates.” Beyond that, they couldn’t speak to the sell of why folks should plan to be here.

And the clearer that a project can be, the clearer that we are as an organization to say, “here’s who we are, here’s exactly what we’re trying to do and here are the hooks for you, 1 2 3,” the easier it is for those agencies to plan with us.

[Shawn]

Tova and Kate are in different regions of the province, and yet in both instances, they’re speaking to similar strategies. Tova’s practical business approach to clearly identifying what Fringe North is and does set an important foundation for being able to loop into larger tourism marketing campaigns. And what Kate described are ways that RTO 12’s branding of the region has prompted a really beautiful and authentic way for arts and culture to create their products.

Beth from TIAC speaks to how that kind of experience is exactly what cultural tourists are seeking—they want to feel like a local. And artists are the ones who tell the stories about our communities and create a sense of belonging for tourists.

[Beth]

So many people want to experience that sense of place. They want the authentic experience.  They want to go down into the community level and really experience beneath the sheen if I might say.

That’s where arts and culture can really help. They can be the lore, they can be the draw, and they help animate those spaces. And they really do our local artists, they are the backbone of our communities. They’re the ones that are filling our shops on Main Street. They’re the people that are volunteering in our communities. They’re creative thinkers, they’re problem solvers. They are contributing to our community in other ways that we don’t even think about sometimes! But the nuts and the bolts of it is they’re the ones that really can help drive people to that destination.

You think about how many small towns how, you know, even in downtown Toronto, where murals have really become a way of telling the story of that street, that community, the history that’s there, you know, I can visualize a number of murals that I’ve seen, that absolutely tell the story of the town that I’m in. And those are local artists that are doing that. They’re knowledgeable about the history, they’re knowledgeable about how this community came to be.

If you look at all those bedroom communities outside of urban centres, you know, they become commuter hubs. Now, artists help remind us that they weren’t always that, that they were founded for a reason. There was a real community there that came together to help basically design and build our country.

[Shawn]

We’ve talked in this series about demand and appealing to what cultural tourists want to experience. This is a very business-centric approach, and one that we do believe is an important strategy for our sector. But let’s not forget a central value nearly ubiquitous across arts and culture—that the arts are an undeniable human need. This is where we can start to think of demand, from a tourism business perspective, as just another way of saying need, as we understand it in our sector. That is, we demand what we need.

Tim from the Shaw Festival speaks very strongly about this. You’ve heard him before on the arts as charitable work, but I want to share with you another part of my conversation with him. As our sector is leaning into complex issues like climate change, Indigenous-settler relations, systemic racism, accessibility, and more, a perspective like Tim’s really drives home a way of situating ourselves as central to community building. This brings us right back around to the very central pillar of regenerative tourism: that any tourist activity makes a place better than it was.

[Tim Jennings]

I think that art-making – and theatre in specific – serves basic human needs. I talk a lot about this, it is a specific point of view: I do not see what we do as work of a not-for-profit. Although we have a not-for-profit status, that is a corporate entity thing. But we’re a charity. And the acts related to what we do are charitable and there are reasons for that.

I spent a lot of my life trying to look back and saying why is art charitable? What about it is serving these basic human needs? And, in Canada at least, most charitable activity theoretically is serving some version of basic human needs.

Art was one of those things right off the bat that was named intrinsic to society, we need to support this. If you look back at the Renaissance, you’ll think about all the patrons who supported artists and made beautiful architecture and all the rest.

For me, all of the things that we do – and at the Shaw Festival in particular, probably because of the civic provocations of George Bernard Shaw – it becomes very easy for us to look at that and say how does this serve people? How are people included in this place?

When the theatre talks about its not-for-profit status, I think they’re missing a chance to be more involved in their community. That’s why I talk about us as a charity, and I tried to get all of my folks here to talk about it as a charity. If we’re a charity, how do we help?

What I’m finding – and we certainly have found at the Shaw prior to the pandemic but it’s carried us through the pandemic – is that in shifting our focus that way, our donors, the people who were deeply involved with us, got more deeply involved with us and have contributed more money to our causes. Because ultimately, they see the programs we’re delivering as in service to a larger community. That has helped us deliver more programs – more art and more community program or education programs. People want to get involved with something that they feel is reflecting their values – and I hope we do that.

One thing I would say to everybody listening is that uniquely identified brands are actually really strong. Here’s a tourism tip: if you stand out, if you don’t look like everything else around you, more people will gravitate to you because they will see themselves in your business.

For a very long time, I would say Stratford and Shaw look very alike, I think people would compare them as being fairly similar festivals. Because we had a very similar framework of how we were built – we’re both built on a US, destination theatre model. It was a very straightforward thought process. But I think now actually if you look at the kind of work we’re doing and the kind of work they’re doing, they’re quite different. Stratford’s done a really good job of digging into new Canadian work, they’re doing all sorts of interesting things with video and television. We’re very focused on a live experience. We’re branching into concerts and outdoor activities. There’s a very different vibe, but they’re compatible vibes. It makes us part of a better ecology.

I wish the theatre industry would describe itself as a charitable movement, as opposed to a series of individual theatres. If more of us were all working toward the same common goals, we get a lot more done.

[Shawn]

The piece about people seeing themselves reflected in your work—it has so many applications. From a social justice perspective, it centres diversity and inclusion. And yet, people seeing themselves reflected in your business, as Tim said, is what tourism is all about.

Braiding together these threads addresses so many key components of regenerative tourism that also allows us in arts and culture to change our own creative and business practices towards building better, more inclusive communities. As Tim said, if more of us were all working towards the same common goals, we’d get a lot more done. And that goes for working with tourism, too.

Well, we’ve reached the end of our episode on marketing the relationship between arts and culture and tourism. And also, the end of the first Ontario Culture Days’ Departure Lounge audio course podcast! Thank you for joining us on this journey. And an equally big thank you to the experts who shared their insights with us: Janis, Tova, Kate, Tim, Beth, and Meredith. For more on who they are and the work they do, visit our website.

Writing and producing this series was very much a team effort. The people you haven’t heard but who were so much a part of making this happen are my colleagues Louis-Etienne Dubois and Frédéric Dimanche, as well as Ruth Burns, Meaghan Froh Metcalf, and their team at Ontario Culture Days. And this podcast is only one part of a larger project on cultural tourism in Ontario with an advisory of many people from across the province. Thank you to all of them.

I’m Shawn Newman, host of the Ontario Culture Days’ Departure Lounge. This podcast was made possible thanks to support from the Province of Ontario and the Canada Council for the Arts. And thanks to you for listening.

^[1] Christian Simenc. “6 millions de personnes ont vu l’Arc de Triomphe empaqueté.” The Art Newspaper. 19 November 2021.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Richards, 2021