### ODT Online on Fri, 17 May 2013
City planning single marketing arm
By Debbie Porteous
Total responsibility for marketing Dunedin to the outside world will not be transferred to Tourism Dunedin, after a series of concerns were raised about a proposal to do so.
Dunedin city councillors have decided the city’s marketing functions should still be brought into a single agency, as proposed in the council’s draft annual plan for 2013-14, but not one run by Tourism Dunedin, after concerns that would not meet the main aim of having a consistent city marketing message.
In the meantime, the status quo would remain while a steering group considered options for setting up the agency, including establishing a council-owned organisation (CCO) or the council delivering all marketing functions in-house.
Investigating a single marketing agency is one of the projects outlined in the city’s economic development strategy.
The proposal outlined in the draft annual plan was to merge city-wide marketing activities into a single marketing agency that would co-ordinate tourism, events, investment, skills and migrant promotion and attraction efforts, as well as be responsible for city branding and operate Dunedin’s i-Site. The aim was more efficient and effective marketing activity.
Read more
Report – Council – 15/05/2013 (PDF, 512.2 KB)
Marketing Agency Proposal Consultation
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Remember when . . .
I am Dunedin launch, January 2001
Grainy image, just like the campaign, with ‘famous’ faces (detail from a photo by Jane Dawber, ODT)
Ben Fahy, at Idealog (October 19, 2010 @ 10:25 am): “Previous branding had been done in-house by the council, including the classic slogans ‘It’s all right here’ (often exchanged for the more comical ‘It’s alright here’) and ‘I am Dunedin’. Wisely, a slogan was avoided and Dunedin is the brand (the logo, a trendy, more contemporary gothic script that embraces the town’s Scottish heritage, is inspired by Nom-D’s now famous ‘Dunedin’ t-shirts). At the same time, the campaign is also confronting some of the engrained—and perhaps negative—perceptions of the city head on…”
Similar talking-through-a hole-in-the-neck has been rebounding ever since DCC tried to brand the city without branding the city. Confused?
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Related Post and Comments:
3.3.13 Tourism Dunedin —city councillors not convinced
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr
What if? Dunedin... 
The ODT quest for a new slogan was brilliant. Never a day without a smile at the very least, often a raucous guffaw, as long as suggestions kept flowing in. My favourites were “Dunedin, slogan-free city” and “Dunedin, it’s highly rated.”
The pisstake ones were all the way up to Great. The sincere praising ones were dire. Dire and clunky as a square tyre. Why is it so hard to praise snappily?
Dunedin, too cool for droids………
The only city slogan I can remember which had some appeal for me….years ago… was Wellington’s ‘Absolutely Positively Wellington’. Not sure why I liked it. Otherwise most of them are pretty try hard and silly.
When we lived in New Plymouth the entry sign to town said, ‘New Plymouth – Pulse of the Energy Province’. NP had about 45k people.
Even Milton has one. ‘Town of Opportunities’. If you work in the prison, I guess.
See what I mean. Any other silly ones come to mind???
The current Dunedin campaign of leaving stickers plastered across other people’s cities comes across as a too-clever-by-half hipster campaign with immeasurable results. Not that that would worry people who seem to not have to worry about justifying their funding. And who will probably be sitting on the steering group deciding how to carve up the budget among their respective “enterprises”.
“Dunedin city councillors have decided the city’s marketing functions should still be brought into a single agency, as proposed in the council’s draft annual plan for 2013-14, but not one run by Tourism Dunedin, after concerns that would not meet the main aim of having a consistent city marketing message.
In the meantime, the status quo would remain while a steering group considered options for setting up the agency, including establishing a council-owned organisation (CCO) or the council delivering all marketing functions in-house.”
Idiots. Give me water and take the shit away. It is that simple.
For marketing I’ll pay someone in another country to NOT TAKE YOUR ADVICE.
Yeah right!
### ODT Online Wed, 10 Jul 2013
Corporate tourism boom in Dunedin
By Rosie Manins
Dunedin’s time is now, those in the corporate tourism industry say. The city is hosting more conferences, large meetings and other business events than it has for years. Forsyth Barr Stadium and the refurbished Dunedin Centre, which comprised the town hall, Glenroy Auditorium and several conference and meeting rooms, were attracting event organisers, Tourism Dunedin chief executive Hamish Saxton said. The Edgar Centre and Larnach Castle were also catering for an increasing number of corporate activities, he said. The lack of facilities in Christchurch meant some business events had moved south to Dunedin, and that was likely to remain the case until at least 2017, when the proposed Christchurch convention centre and associated infrastructure was built, Mr Saxton said.
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“The main aim of having a consistent city marketing message”, this from a flock of turkeys who have so little sense of direction they couldn’t aim a tennis ball at a woolshed and hit it at 12 paces.
Anyway what’s the point of a “consistent” marketing message, when you’re promoting different goods, services, opportunities and attractions to different markets? “Dunedin, come to us and get dicked around at vast expense, we’ve got an award-winning covered stadium to pay for”?
“Something’s FISHY at Dunedin”
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### ODT Online Sun, 19 May 2013
Dunedin becoming ‘Salmon City’
By Dan Hutchinson
New York is the city that never sleeps, some call Paris the city of love but Dunedin is fast gaining a moniker people can really sink their teeth into – ”Salmon City”. Dunedin Community Salmon Trust chairman Brett Bensemann said Vancouver and Dunedin were the only two cities in the world where people could catch salmon from an inner-city wharf.
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Often it’s the little oddnesses that make people want to come visit a place. Not thousands all at once, but steady trickles of benign anoraks who’d like the novelty of fishing “in the middle of the city”. Or walking up the steepest street, or have a thing about the history of gasworks, or involved in community gardening back home and would love to see how it’s working in other countries. There is dumb tourism obsession with mega attractions, the dumbest of which are huge events that stretch resources to the point of inefficiency, rugby world cup for instance, that also grab huge amounts of money for promotion and baksheesh. Steady flows keep B&B’s and other accommodation alive, keep restaurants doing steady business, allow services (taxis for instance) to grow at a prudent pace. They also don’t overwhelm locals, so we remain free to go about our normal business and leisure without disruptive stress. And that in turn leaves us with the relaxed attitude with which we greet strangers, take time to help lost ones, act warm and friendly towards them and leave them with an impression they’ll talk about for years afterwards, back home – the lovely holiday they had in NZ and especially in Dunedin where people are friendly and take the time to be helpful.
I know it’s hard to make campaigns based on minority interests. Perhaps an effective way would be to reward people within the local community who post to Youtube about interesting activities and get a good number of hits. If people who had put up their own picks of what fascinates them, this would encourage a variety of enthusiasms to be showcased, and those who do it could then list with the DCC in the hope of one of a share of a few thousand dollars – doesn’t need to be a lot per person, the greatest reward is recognition that builds credibility for the cv >> new/better employment.
It’s amazing how short some people’s memories are. Only a few years ago one of my colleagues John Bell set up a full scale hatchery in the old treatment plant at Sawyers Bay. For two to three years serious numbers of adequately grown young salmon were put into the Harbour and in immediately subsequent years I can remember the rows of people hanging over the Leith bridge as they came up the Leith in their dozens and the squadrons of boats going to and fro in the channel and pulling them out of the Harbour.
It is of course no longer operating. These things need money to continue, even if run off a shoestring, and this money had to either come from the DCC in the form of a grant and/or from those who were hoiking them out of the water – perhaps in the form of an enforceable license system or pre-pay tail-tag to be applied to fish caught in the Harbour.
These necessary funds were not forthcoming. Perhaps refusal from the former source might be understandable, but from the latter – especially those who were making a daily semi-commercial 2-3 fish pilgrimage out of this wholly unnatural bonanza seems a little harder to understand. The salmon were plentiful and free for a while – but now they are just free – if you can spare the time to find one of fhe very few that live to return. Nature’s bounty they were not.
Certainly the lesson learned from the experience was that it is essential to get a cast iron legally enforceable system up and running to extract the necessary revenue from the angling community BEFORE cash is pushed in that direction again from whatever source.
That’s so sad.
Would a harbour-license, or salmon license, have worked?
Whatever it cost it had to be a heck of a lot cheaper than the Fubar, and a lot more of an attraction both to visitors and people who’d like to live where you can go fishing close to home. Not that people choose where to make their home based on only one factor, but the more pluses in the mix the better. “Build it and they will come” to quote a local genius talking about something else, even geniuses have a bad day innit!
Only with enforcement and sanctions, but my experience is that such things become self propelling once a critical level of compliance is reached on the basis that ‘I’ve paid, so you can bloody pay too!’.
However, it would undoubtedly have to be backed by law and stiff sanctions along the line of current quota practice to begin with, as there is a strong culture of ‘nature’s bounty for me and for free’ out there. However the tail tag user-pays system could fund enforcement as well as input once established as a major pastime with smoult going in and adult fish coming out in big numbers.
Another area that might well need attention before sinking resources into it is “””accidental salmon bycatch””” by commercial fishing boats out to sea when the fish are massing to come into the river/harbour. ‘I know it’s a boatload of salmon but I was really was after snapper honest Guv!!’ I seem to recall that this practice has put paid to earlier schemes and enriched the perpetrators considerably in the process…
While wasteful, a policy of immediate salmon throw back and a ban on salmon in any boat in the relevant parts of the harbour approaches might well reduce the incidence of such ‘accidents’… I believe that the salmon massing points and times are well known.
Bluntly, a lot of legal and political work has to be done before any such scheme has a prayer of reaching the scale that it would be both financially self-sustaining and of any commercial significance to this city. However, it is eminently feasible if such spadework is done.
However, producing smoult without such preparation would simply be throwing further investment away in the direction of those who have already made off with previous third party inputs…
“Ho Hum, fiddley dee, the cat’s in the cupboard and can’t see me.” That is about where Hamish Saxton’s level of competence is , and to quote him as an authority on anything like ‘corporate tourism’ shows a dearth of journalistic depth. Rosie, go away and grow up. Hamish, just go away. You have no idea just how ridiculous you sound when you make some of the outlandish claims that you do. If it is not telling us how many $millions of economic benefits accruing to the city with cruise ship visits it is telling us that there could be up to 17 events in Dunedin in the next 18 months. That wouldn’t even be one per venue available. Hamish, if you read the details surrounding just the Town Hall complex alone, you would see in the original consultants’ feasibility report, on which the development was based, that there would be some 36 conferences per year by 2016, and even at that, it would show a loss of some $4.2m per annum, after debt servicing. Hamish, these are the facts of life that you seem oblivious to, or more likely just choose to ignore. Face it, your job and the whole ‘industry’ is an overhead that we citizens could well do without. Like most of what goes down in this ‘amoral’ netherworld called Council Business. Just go away!
Plenty of other opportunities out there for promotion – that don’t involve the ODT and this vacuous council wasting money on empty projects instead of core business.
### Stuff Online Last updated 05:00 29/03/2014
Minnesota to Dunedin and loving it
By Rebecca van Amber
I came to New Zealand in 2007 as a 23-year-old who just wanted to experience somewhere different, do some travel and get another degree. All of my friends had either just gotten married or spent a year travelling abroad and since I wasn’t keen to go down the aisle quite yet, I thought the only next logical step was to join the overseas travel cohort. So I quit my job and came to New Zealand – having never been here before, but hearing that it was an extremely beautiful country.
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http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff-nation/assignments/home-sweet-expat-home/9879037/Minnesota-to-Dunedin-and-loving-it