International conferences are a key segment of the international travel and tourism market. With three new large conference centres recently built across New Zealand, Tourism New Zealand were seeking direction on how to grow awareness and demand for New Zealand as a destination to host major international conferences, as well as understanding current perceptions.
Approach
The key people involved in selecting destinations for international conferences are a highly diffuse, globally spread target audience. To recruit this particularly hard to reach group, we took a flexible, iterative approach to recruitment, supported by desk research to map the market and identify higher potential recruitment channels. Ultimately, our hands on approach to recruitment enabled us to successfully recruit a robust sample of quality respondents from over 25 countries.
Our methodology began with qualitative interviews to map the decision-making process, key drivers and perceptions of New Zealand as a destination for conferences. These decision drivers were translated into survey powered to deliver a Bayesian Belief Network which provided clarity on the hierarchy and inter-relationship of decision drivers, and the optimal way to position and communicate New Zealand’s offer to deliver against these.
By constructing a Bayesian Belief Network to explore the decision-making drivers, it enabled us to cut through the complexity of the decision-making process and the extensive competitive landscape to uncover three critical issues for TNZ to focus efforts. Our outputs provided actionable recommendations on how to address these issues and the optimal positioning territories to focus future creative and comms. This work forms the basis for a multi-year strategy focused on growing New Zealand’s share of the international conferences market.