Incoming DMAI Chair: Branding: Name of the Game

Rachelle Crum -- Tradeshow Week, 7/17/2006

At the close of this week's Destination Marketing Assn. Intl. Annual Convention in Austin, Texas, William D. Talbert III, president and CEO of the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, will begin his one-year term as chairman of the association.

With what Talbert has done for Miami, his leadership is sure to impress DMAI members. In his 15 years with the bureau (six in his current post and nine as COO), some of Talbert's major accomplishments have included assisting with the passage of a food and beverage tax to fund the bureau's advertising budget; leading the Miami CVB to become the first bureau in the country to increase promotional efforts following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11; and preparing four successful Super Bowl and three Intl. Pow Wow bids.

Talbert is a past chairman of the DMAI Foundation Board of Trustees and the Florida Assn. of Convention & Visitors Bureaus. He was named the 2002 Tourism Professional of the Year by the Academy of Travel and Tourism.

Talbert spoke with Tradeshow Week Senior Assistant Editor Rachelle Crum about the groundwork for DMAI's name change (from Intl. Assn. of Convention & Visitors Bureaus) last year, the road ahead for the association and what appears to be his favorite word: branding.

Question: As incoming chairman of DMAI, what are your primary goals for the association in the year ahead?

Answer: It's three words: brand, brand and brand. As you know, we've changed our name, and it's going to be about brand awareness in the coming year, not only in the United States, but around the world.

I come from a brand background, and I think all we do is branding, so my efforts are going to focus in on that. I know we have a strong brand, and we're going to push that very hard in the coming year.

Q: Give me an example of what you have done with branding in Miami.

A: We have focused in on the Miami brand in the last few years as we've become more of an upscale destination. We're selling Miami as a fashion brand I think unlike anybody in the world. We are actually in publications selling Miami just like you would offer Gucci, Rolex, or any high-end brand. And that branding program has been very well received in the marketplace.

We focus in on one word: Miami — not all the long political terms. We just have that one word out there. We focus in on the brand, even sometimes at the expense of the bureau. Outside of Miami we sell the brand, and inside we promote the company as a destination marketing organization. We eat, sleep and live branding. Really, that's all there is.

Q: Why are you such a believer in branding?

A: Just look at what private companies do. Whether it's Coca-Cola or Mercedes, we're all selling a product. We're all now becoming brand managers.

We have the Destination Marketing brand now in the marketplace. And over the last couple of years, having been involved in the change, we've changed our name from a noun to a verb. I characterize IACVB as a noun and Destination Marketing as a verb, more action-oriented.

Our members, by more than 80 percent, supported the name change and really the brand repositioning. Our membership is up. We're going to take that mandate from our members and continue to build the brand awareness.

Q: What else do you want to accomplish over the next 12 months?

A: We have a new student (member) category, we have a new category of state and regional associations, so we're extending the brand but also extending the representation of Destination Marketing. We'll move those programs forward, as well as the certification programs, the whole educational program, and research programs that I think in the past DMAI has been known for.

DMAI, in part of this brand awareness, will in the first quarter of 2007 look into opening a European office to really extend the international part. We're very excited about that. And coming from an international destination myself — in Miami, half of our customers are international — we're very much committed to those kinds of international initiatives.

At the same time, I'm going to reach out to bureau members that are small, medium and large. Although we may be a bit of a larger bureau, I'm sensitive to the needs — and by the way, they're largely the same — of our medium and small members. We are not going to in any way forget their needs.

Q: Why has the association's name change been well received?

A: It was not a sudden decision. It was a process that really went on for two years. It was very thoughtful, based on a lot of research. It was done so well that the membership responded with an 83-percent margin, which is kind of unheard of when you ask members to vote on something. To have that kind of support told us that we went about it in the right way.

We learned from the mistakes of others who made those changes way too quickly, and their members were in no way up to speed. It was a very deliberative process with lots and lots and lots of good outside research and involvement of both our board and our members.

Q: What groups are you referring to?

A: I'm not going to name the groups. They know who they are.

Q: Have DMAI members begun to embrace the dot-travel domain name opportunity that became available last year?

A: I know there are several schools of thoughts on this dot-travel. (In Miami) I know we have very much embraced it. Our mayor gladly signed a letter designating, in our case, Miami dot-travel. We probably secured 50 dot-travel sites as part of this process. I think it's probably better to be safe and get in on the ground floor and see where it goes. We think there's potential value there.

Q: How did DMAI benefit from having John Hutchison, a CVB leader from outside the country, as chairman in the last year?

A: I think it goes with extending our brand awareness around the world. Coming from Sydney, Australia, he is a tremendous industry leader there and a tremendous industry leader throughout that part of the world. He brought great wisdom and great vision to us.

He's really given great leadership and energy to our internationalization efforts throughout this year. He was the right guy at the right time for what we were doing this past year.

Q: A few years ago, there were spending scandals involving some bureaus, including those in Denver and Cleveland. That more or less coincided with some city-funded bureaus being forced by local government to cut their budgets. Are the purse strings for these city-funded bureaus still as tight?

A: I don't know if they're tight because of that. I think maybe the oversight is a little tighter. At the end of the day, the message we try to get to our partners, our government partners, is it's a competitive marketplace. You have to be transparent.

We've never had those issues here (in Miami) — never. There have been scandals at newspapers, there've been scandals at magazines, and there've been scandals in government. So, I don't know that destination marketing organizations are any better or any worse than society in general.

At the end of the day, it's about managing public monies in the right way. The fact of the matter is, wherever there was a problem, it was corrected and you move on. If you have a hiccup and the competition gets the business, people are not going to be working in your community. You've got to be smart.