EDITORIAL
How do we evaluate tourism marketing?

Here's a little irony from the world of tourism marketing:

• For marketing its product in Japan, the Hawai'i Tourism Authority has decided to replace the Hawai'i Visitors & Convention Bureau with a home-grown Tokyo advertising agency, Dentsu Inc.

• The Japanese government has skipped over Japan's top advertising agencies — including Dentsu — to hire Honolulu-based Starr Seigle Communications to market travel to Japan from the entire United States.

The reasons are fairly clear. The HTA withdrew some business from HVCB after it took a beating from a damning state audit.

The Japanese government, for its part, liked Starr Seigle's pitch that Japan needs to be seen through American eyes.

Japanese advertisers take for granted things that make Americans' eyes grow round, like riding bullet trains. Starr Seigle, from its headquarters at the cultural crossroads of the Pacific, should be ideally placed to identify and communicate such "gee whiz" factors.

It's possible that the same kind of thinking will benefit HTA, as Dentsu looks at Hawai'i through Japanese eyes.

So are Hawai'i and Japan tourism likely to pick up because of these new marketing approaches? And how will we know?

In a revealing article in yesterday's paper, Advertiser business writer Kelly Yamanouchi analyzed the HVCB's claims that the mission led by Gov. Linda Lingle to Japan produced 136 million "impressions" on consumers, worth more than $759,000 in media exposure.

We appreciate the attempt to produce objective measures of the effectiveness of marketing efforts paid for with public money. But as Yamanouchi found, the use of "impressions" in media exposure to suggest a cause-and-effect increase in travel "should be greeted with skepticism."

It's a big stretch from consumer communication to measuring bodies boarding Hawai'i-bound aircraft.

Even if Japanese travel to Hawai'i rebounds, it will be tough to know whether it's due to Dentsu, or simply a rebounding Japan economy.

Ultimately it appears we spend to market tourism because we're warned that competitive destinations are spending plenty on their own marketing. The fear is that if we don't match, we'll fall behind.

That may be so, but who knows for sure?