Reinventing God's own country: Kerala Tourism reaches out to millennials

Kerala Tourism looks to brand the state as the ayurveda and adventure destination of the world

One of the earliest to jump into the destination branding game in India, Kerala Tourism is spicing up its offering. Keen to attract the local millennial traveller and expand the tourist circuit within the state, it is promoting the state as a hotspot for unique experiences. To get more international tourists in, it is developing the backwaters as the focal point for adventure and leisure tourism.
 

P Bala Kiran, director, Kerala Tourism Department says that the state wants to reinvent itself for the millennial. He says that while Kerala is a familiar brand for tourists across the world, it is not getting too many under-35 year olds as travellers. The state is looking to push up international tourist arrivals by over 13 per cent and domestic arrival by over 8 per cent every year. "To achieve this there is no other way, but to reinvent ourselves," says Kiran. 
 

The ongoing campaign that was launched along with the Kochi Muziris biennale (December 2016-March 2017) has a strong digital focus, a medium that helps the state reach its target audience most effectively. The department spends around 30 per cent of its budget on branding and marketing, around 60 per cent on upgrading public infrastructure, creation of destinations, parks, light and sound shows etc. The share of digital has increased significantly and for its latest ‘Dream Season’ campaign it accounted for 20 per cent of the total Rs 5.5 crore advertising budget.
 

In 2016-17, the state saw 1.03 millioninternational tourists, up by 6.3 per cent as compared to the previous year. Domestic tourists numbered 13.1 million,  5.4 per cent more than last year. The aim is to double the number of travellers from home and abroad by 2021. For that, Kiran says, millennials are an important target group. 
 

The focus would be while retaining and increasing the existing portfolios and locations, to attract new generations. North Kerala will be promoted in a big way with a major thrust on experience-led tourism, he adds.
 

North Kerala is still a largely under-developed destination. Kiran says that around 80 per cent or even more of tourists to the state stick to the South, bypassing the rest of the state that offers the same landscape and experiences. If this is developed, it could attract young local travellers with attractive prices and unexplored destinations.
 

There is also a need to establish a unique identity for Kerala. While the state has always been known for its backwaters, the department is keen to create a stronger association between the two.  According to Kiran, Kerala is positioned and identified as a houseboat and backwater destination. While that is known to those tourists who have visited the state, he wants to create a stronger brand recall around this proposition. 
 

It needs to be popularised as a brand symbol he says. “Once anybody thinks about Kerala, backwaters and houseboats should come to their mind. Just like the Indigo (airline) is associated with dots,” Kiran says.
 

The state has been consistent with its branding initiatives; adding new concepts around the core brand every two to three years. Backwaters, houseboat destination, ayurveda hotels—these are sub brands built around the core brand say experts. Now the time is right to address the brand’s age problem they say and that is the reason, the state department is putting its might behind building adventure tourism. Kiran says, “We are not going to promote casinos, night clubs, but adventure tourism, water activities, trekking.”
 

The state has 44 rivers, but only a few of them are being used at present. It has forests and hills that could be used for trekking and other activities and the department says it is investing in basic infrastructure. The objective is to create an experience out of the trip as that is what the millennial travellers are looking for. The tourism department is setting up experience circuits that offer tourists a chance to live and eat like locals to begin with. “People can stay even for 10 days with locals, eat with them, be part of their culture, play chanda, a musical instrument, and trek around,” Kiran says. He wants to scale  up the experience circuit plan, but only after studying the initial response. 
 

More than creating the product, the brand and the sub brands, the department says its biggest challenge is communication. The language and communication channels used to market Kerala in the 1980s and 1990s are irrelevant today says Kiran. He explains that the current campaign is a sharp shift away from the past, in the use of media and the messaging.  

The campaign has been launched online and they are “All short videos and pictures that get the attention in a second,” says Kiran. The Kerala Tourism page has 1.4 million followers, a million on Twitter and 80,000 on Instagram. This is significantly above any of the other state tourism spots on social media but Kiran says, "We are not competing with other tourism websites, but with celebrities." 
 

The frequency of the campaigns is high, since digital demands a 24x7 engagement and the department has a team feeding in and updating the pages with short videos every hour. The campaigns are hash tagged and promoted on all platforms. They are also roping in online opinion makers and aggregators. While the aggregators are being targeted through advertisements, influencers are being used to generate reviews and such other content. 
 

The department has also been wooing travel bloggers, recently it invited  bloggers from 23 countries to Northern Kerala. Kerala is a popular destination in Western Europe including UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and France; in these countries it has built a network among the business-to-business travel fraternity. However in an interesting twist, the department is seeing a huge bump in tourist arrivals from Saudi Arabia. Life could soon be coming full circle for the state.