Fop sale: one moment in time

Developments

By Usa Williams

Making money out of the countdown to the year 2000 may not seem like everyone’s cup of tea, but for professional com municator Bernadette Rounds- Ganilau, it’s the dream job of the cen tury - literally. Ganilau is the Millennium Co-ordinator for the South Pacific Millennium Consortium, and she is out firing up the region on how to best position itself in market terms for that big moment when the Pacific steps into a new era. There is a major reason why the count down to midnight on New Years Eve, 1999 should be so very important: for travel des tinations all over the globe, selling your country as the place for travellers to usher in the next century, means big money.

Ganilau says the Pacific is already grab bing the attention of operators. “We have the unique position in this globe of strad dling the 118th meridian and having two time zones because pf the International date line. We are the first in the world to greet the new day,” she says. Make that Tonga and Fiji, but Ganilau does not want to split hairs. Part of the Millennium Consortium’s Memorandum of Understanding is that the region market itself without individual cat fights over strategic positions where and when.

“We won’t have this fight, this pulling of one to the other,” she says. Which does n’t stop the inevitable question over who will be first and who will be last. Fiji and Tonga have claim to the former but the honour of the latter goes to the Cooks, Ganilau told industry people during a May seminar on Events Marketing helped along by Tourism Cook Islands and Air New Zealand.

“The Cook Islands will be the last coun try in the world to say good-bye to the old century and the last country in the world to say hello to the new century. You should really cash in on that,” says Ganilau.

So why not let national tourism plans do the work of marketing the Millennium?

Because the Millennium Celebrations must start now, says Ganilau. She and tourism operators who are looking up and ahead rather than around at the depressing drop

in figures affecting long-haul travel to the region know that visitors plan months or years ahead when dreaming up holiday destinations. Event’s publicity of the Millennium kind should really be in their hands right this very instant, rather than still in the heads of local operators dream ing of planeloads of tourists touching down on the strength of one good event such as the last ten seconds to the year 2000. The Millennium celebrations must start now, in 1998, says Ganilau.

“Rather than aiming at a flood of visi tors just to come here for the last few days of 1999, make them come here all through 1999 and spend the last holiday of the cen tury in the Cooks watching the last Dancer of the Year this century, the last Song quest this century, the last Miss Tiare for teen

beauty queens.”

She is infectious. With her physical stature (she is taller than most people) and warm broadcaster’s voice, she does a good job of making the Millennium seem mere moments away. Celebrating now makes more sense than rushing all the holiday making into the last moments before New Years and couple of days after that, she says. “Infrastructurally, we cannot cope

anyway, and why should we have to build all these facilities to cope for the three days? After that, then what, we rot and die?

The thing now I think is to lead up to the Millennium next year. Let them celebrate their last anniversaries for the century in Paradise (whether that be in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, or the Cook Islands) - and let them do their first celebration of the new centu ry back here too.” Ganilau says the impor tant thing is to establish 1999 as a year long continual calendar of events leading up to the big bang, so that all the flights here in 1999 are full, not just the ones com ing home in the last week of December which are incidentally full of returning Cook Islanders every holiday season of every year.

Not all the talking for Ganilau is full on, hard-sell about the importance of the Millennium moment. She’s watched Kiribati’s current struggle to re-situate the International Date Line and bring the Caroline Islands onto the same side as the rest of the group - not a priority before, but an urgent money-making priority now.

What if they succeed, and beat the big con tenders to being the first?

“Then I say ‘good luck’ to them,” says

Ganilau, “if they succeed, the Christmas Islands in the Caroline group will be the first to greet the new dawn, and I wish them all the best.” She means it, because it goes back to the infrastructure argument that you can’t build new hotels, wharves, roads and shops to handle an island that will be the worlds hottest spot for a few days. The Millennium woman wants to see

marketing plans including but not exclu

sive to the millennium moment so that the hotels stay full and locals stay in jobs all year round.

Already, Kiribati is finding datelines are dicey things to play with, especially when it comes to having Japanese consortiums backing the move. With the economic situ ation in Asia dictating investment ventures into the Pacific, the Japanese have put everything on hold, including plans for Christmas Island.

On the whole, though, plans to make the most of the Millennium are going well, says Ganilau. By August the calendars should be out, targeting travellers all over the world organising their holidays for the next year. The Millennium logo is still being taken throughout the region. On t shirts, on posters, the job of selling the image of the Millennium consortium has not been easy. Private businesses and cor porate bodies would pay dearly to have

something, such as the Olympic rings,

affixed to their product. It isn’t quite the same for an unknown muscle man blowing a conch shell.

“You can’t place this brand on them no matter how powerful it is, no matter how once in a lifetime it is to anyone. There is no such thing,” says Ganilau. So she took the easier route - email, a web site and information page with the Tourism Council of the South Pacific, a promotional video and Millennium Day broadcast link with the BBC.

So a year after being appointed to the job, she’s travelling the region, asking here and there what people are doing, dropping gentle reminders and heavy hints that it’s time to really get on with it, letting coun tries in on something that’s no big secret selling themselves, but is certainly a big deal.

“We’ve done the dots, now you join them. That’s the basics,” is how Ganilau summarises her message. “I’m not selling any strategy. I’m not selling any marketing plan. I’m just going to say Cook Islands, Samoa, Fiji, you have got so much to offer.

Don’t keep it a secret too long.” ■

Bernadette Rounds Ganilau