Northstar

www.travelweekly-asia.com 26 | ITB ASIA OFFICIAL DAILIES news highlights NIELSEN OFFERS BACK-TO-BASIC MARKETING TIPS By Eve Yap MAKE A STOPOVER, SAYS FINLAND BY LEE XIN HUI Consumer neuroscience findings provide valuable insights. The best advertising or video clip of your beach resort may not persuade today's consumer to part with his dollar — if you don't emotionally move him, according to Nielsen. "Recent studies show that people make decisions at the intuitive level, and start justifying the reasons for their decision later," said Kaushal Upadhyay, Nielsen's executive director, client service growth and emerging markets. Knowing what makes the consumer's heart race or eye pop moments before he clicks buy is key to clinching a customer or a sale, added Upadhyay. Which is why Nielsen, better known for its established system of television ratings, has entered KEEP IT SIMPLE. That does not mean bland or boring. Keep a sentence to no more than four or five words, or you lose the visitor. LEVERAGE THE SENSES. Use the sense of touch, taste, smell, hearing or sight consistently to form part of your brand, such as how a particular fragrance of coffee spells Starbucks. Think virtual reality too. COLOUR CAN BE A GAME CHANGER. People make a subconscious judgment about a product or person within 90 seconds of viewing. So, the shade of white in the snow matters for a ski resort. DELIVER YOUR PROMISE QUICKLY. Don't make the registration process too cumbersome. Anything more than two or three steps to fill a form disengages the customer. PERSONALISE. People connect to what's relevant to them and also what's current. For example, an advertisement showing Olympic medal-winner Joseph Schooling will resonate better with local audiences than one with another star. MAKE IT STICKY (FUN). People like familiarity. For example, they have preferred routes to get about in a mall. So changing a website's interface every now and then could spell disaster. CREATE INTEGRATED OFFERINGS. Use the same font and same colour throughout touchpoints. Coca-Cola is a brand that is consistent across omni-channels. For Helsinki, the Japanese market "has always been very important especially when it comes to FIT travellers", according to Kaari Artehmjeff, marketing manager of Visit Helsinki, who added that Taiwan, South Korea and India are also key. The StopOver programme consists of 50 packages and services ranging from five hours to five days. Itineraries aim to introduce travellers to different parts of Finland including Helsinki, the Finnish Lapland (think Northern Lights), its outdoors and the lakes of Lakeland. Said Mende, "Our main goal is to have travellers stop over and stay at least for a night, and the second, to increase the number of stopover travellers. Without any marketing communications, we are already seeing a 23 percent growth (for the latter). We hope to have about a 50 percent increase next year and beyond." Complementing the launch of the StopOver Finland initiative is Finnair's inaugural flight of its new Airbus A350 XWB on its Singapore- Helsinki route, which departed from Although customers are moving quickly into a mobile world, brands have not filled the gap between the user experience of an app with that of a mobile web. Brands have to step up their game to fill the gap to engage with the 'new' mobile generation, said Ryan Ferguson, APAC travel lead for Google, in his presentation on "Reimagining mobile" at WIT Conference 2016. About 60 percent of searches for destination information are done on mobile devices, according to Google. "The trend is consumers are engaging with apps more and spending more and more time inside an app. When they start doing that, they are engaging with the brand, and are more valuable to them," added Ferguson. However, the app experience and a mobile web experience are not the same. Apps offer speed, flexibility and notifications that are absent in mobile web. According to research, 40 percent of users will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load; they expect a page to load in less than two seconds. About 52 percent said fast load time is important to site loyalty. "The smartphone is a computer in your pocket, and is mobilising the current generation. It's our job in the industry to make products that consumers can engage with." BY CORINNE WAN Visit Finland, the main partner for this year's ITB Asia 2016, launched its global StopOver Finland initiative yesterday with the aim to grow incoming traveller traffic from Asia. At the moment, the biggest Asian source markets for Finland are China, Japan and Hong Kong. "While South Korea and Singapore are not big at the moment, we are seeing big increases. For instance from January to July, we had 44 percent growth in registered overnights from Singapore," said Heli Mende, head of global sales promotion of Visit Finland. Changi Airport on Monday. The A350 fleet investment will form the backbone of Finnair's strategy to double its Asia traffic, according to statement, and increase its cargo capacity by up to 50%. the world of consumer neuroscience – the science of capturing how the brain reacts to what it sees. It uses data from brainwaves, heart rate and eye tracking, for instance, to gather what about a brand's creatives gets someone's attention, and helps him recall. Known as the Nielsen Consumer Decision Journey metering platform, the findings help a marketer connect the dots between analysing the data and delivering the relevant marketing message. Knowing how consumers react online is key because about two in three people in Asia Pacific make travel purchases online, said Upadhyay, citing Nielsen's statistics. These are its back- to-basics rules of engagement. CREDIT: NIELSEN GOOGLE: FILL THE GAP BETWEEN APP AND MOBILE WEB EXPERIENCES

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