Posted on: Thursday, August 7, 2003

Lingle's mission to Japan may be hard to measure

By Kelly Yamanouchi
Advertiser Staff Writer

Analysis:
The state's trip to Japan to lure tourists may never be measured for success, despite its quarter-million-dollar investment last month.

The state may never know whether Gov. Linda Lingle's trip to Japan will result in more visitors to the Islands because measuring the impact of the visit is like corralling cats.

Lingle herself dismissed the importance of visitor-industry claims last week that the mission to Japan produced 136 million "impressions" on consumers, worth more than $759,000 in media exposure for Hawai'i.

The governor said the numbers she's interested in are how many Japanese visitors come over the next few months as a result of the mission.

But counting mission-generating tourists is going to present a challenge, if not an impossibility.

Even the Hawai'i Visitors & Convention Bureau, which organized the $231,000 mission that took 33 state and county officials, HVCB staffers and entertainers to Japan for seven days, acknowledges the problem.

If the numbers go up, the trip can't be said to be the only thing boosting travel, said Steven Matsuo, HVCB director of Japan sales.

"But it will definitely help to bring things back to where we need to be," he said. Overall, Matsuo said, he believes the mission was successful and that time will prove that.

Just how that proof will be gathered is the problem; marketing success often is based on assumptions and best guesses in the world of tourism marketing.

Travel from Japan to the Islands has been off sharply in the past few months, down 30.9 percent from 121,693 visitors in the first half of last year to 84,096 over the first half of this year.

If the numbers go up, can that be attributed to the governor's trip, or easing of war and SARS fears, or an improving Japanese economy — or all those factors and more?

While the Hawai'i Tourism Authority generally measures the effectiveness of the marketing that it pays HVCB to conduct, it won't measure the impact of the state's mission to Japan.

Lingle's tourism liaison, Marsha Wienert, however, believes that the trip will have an impact.

"There's not going to be an immediate effect because of everything that's going on in Japan, but we hope gradually through the end of the year and next year that we will see an increase," Wienert said.

PacRim's president Dave Erdman said the Japan mission is an important tool for Hawai'i to get exposure, but added that the quality of media exposure could be analyzed in other ways.

But "the best way to evaluate the trip is results, and that would be increased bookings for Hawai'i, new partnerships formed i which will happen over time," Erdman said.

Still there is no direct way to prove that seeing the governor on TV will cause a traveler to book a flight to Hawai'i. Even in Japan, where nearly every aspect of life is measured and surveyed, proof will be elusive.

Matsuo said it's difficult to measure HVCB's efforts by the changes in visitor counts because "we can create the awareness and the desire" to go to Hawai'i, "but we're not the one actually selling so it's difficult to say the marketing brought one person or 10 people."

Some marketers say any mention of Hawai'i in the Japan media helps the cause since it raises general awareness of the Islands. Others might argue Hawai'i's limited marketing dollars could be better spent on a more targeted campaign.

The debate should take an interesting turn now that HVCB no longer will be responsible for marketing Hawai'i to Japan.

The bureau lost the state contracts for international markets to other companies, although it continues to control the lion's share of the state marketing dollars as the agency in charge of North America promotion.

Starting Jan. 1, Tokyo advertising agency Dentsu Inc. will be promoting the Islands to Japan under a contract that will be worth about $6.3 million.

That, in the end, may be the event that will have the most impact on Japanese visitor counts.

But then, that's just a guess.

Reach Kelly Yamanouchi at 535-2470, or at kyamanouchi@honoluluadvertiser.com.

How HVCB counts 'impressions'

Although the Hawai'i Visitors & Convention Bureau does not say directly that the state's recent promotion trip to Japan will translate into increased travel to Hawai'i, its use of the 136 million "impressions" in media exposure for Hawai'i to suggest a cause-and- effect should be greeted with skepticism.

"Impressions" are an estimate of how many times a message, in this case about Hawai'i, had the potential to be communicated to a consumer. One consumer may receive multiple impressions of the same message — from television, magazines and newspapers.

HVCB said its public relations firm Weber Shandwick used an industry standard in Japan to calculate the impressions from the trip.

The number of print impressions from a morning newspaper, for example, was calculated by multiplying circulation by 2.5, the estimated average number of readers per copy. To calculate TV impressions for cable households, HVCB multiplied the number of cable households by 1.1.

Different companies calculate impressions using different multipliers. Local marketing agency PacRim Marketing Group Inc., for example, said it is asked to multiply circulation, viewership or listenership by 1.9 when reporting to state agencies.

— Kelly Yamanouchi