In August, Singapore launched a new tourism brand, going from Your Singapore to Passion Made Possible. The marketing move was a first for the country, in that it is manifested through a joint effort by two statutory boards — the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and the Economic Development Board (EDB).
At the WIT 2017 Conference, STB’s Assistant Chief Executive Lynette Pang, said: “It made a lot of sense because when people think of a country, they don’t think, ‘Oh that is Singapore for play, and that is Singapore for work — they just think of Singapore.’”
She said the lines between work and play have blurred, and even though conference attendees are technically on a business trip, in the evenings, it is leisure that they are looking for.
Still, both government agencies uses Passion Made Possible for separate purposes. Pang said: “The STB builds tourism campaigns out of the brand, and the EDB builds business campaigns out of the brand.”
What is new about this campaign and the brand is the element of storytelling — to give a sense of what a person can “be” in Singapore, rather than previous tourism campaigns that focused on what a person could “do”.
For example, in a video screened on Day Two of the WIT 2017 conference, an engineer says he wants tomorrow’s solutions today and Yeoh Siew Hoon, founder of Web in Travel, tells a younger woman that when she figures out what to do, she should “do it and do it fast”. A narrator talks about how here in Singapore, we seek “to inspire, to motivate, to push towards great”.
That video was targeted at what the STB calls the “progressor tribe” — people who travel with work in mind. Pang said: “We could have told you we got x number of conferences here, x number of meetings, but we wanted to talk about why people travel for business … Show it’s the passion that has helped these people grow their careers and their various businesses.”
The same storytelling element goes into the tours. Pang shared about how many hawkers in Singapore tend to be old, and that theirs is a dying trade. But one woman has curated a tour around next-generation hawkers who are opening “hipster” stalls. She said STB would be working with suppliers on the ground to make such experiences more accessible to travellers when they come to Singapore so that they do experience “Passion Made Possible” on the ground.
On why Singapore chose to tell a story along interest lines — from environment, to food, to shopping, exploration and fashion — Pang said they wanted to get to customers “in the passive stage” – when they may not be actively looking for a destination yet. “Maybe it is January, it is freezing cold, he sees something about Singapore. It is sunny and there’s good food,” said Pang.
“If you think about it, each of us all have our own interests. Everyone has something that drives us that we’re passionate about, and we do think that when you travel, at the back of your mind you want to fulfill your passion for perhaps architecture or design. So it’s that area that we want to play in, we want to talk to the consumer early, in the passive stage.
“They are not really thinking about your destination, but it could be triggered by something else they love.”
