Ah Viva La France!
It seems that we can always look to the French for inspiration when it comes to effectively marketing a destination. They often succeed in capturing the world’s imagination - little wonder that France attracts 88 million visitors each year, and is the world’s number one tourist destination.

How was this achieved? - in many different ways - novels written about life in France helped - a là Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence - but more recently C’est So Paris, responsible for developing and promoting tourism in the Paris Ile-de-France area, is pushing destination marketing to its limits with an ad campaign designed to bring British tourists, especially Londoners, to Paris. Apparently only 3.2 million Brits came to Paris last year. That seems like a lot to a Parisian, especially when all 3.2 million are standing in line to go up the Eiffel Tower. But apparently 3.2 million Brits is not nearly enough.

The new ad campaign includes a website where Brits can, for instance, copy the Parisian attitude by viewing real Parisians in typically Gallic gestures. When asked a question, you push your lips as close to your nose as possible, shrug your shoulders, raise your eyebrows and say nothing. I would love to see an analogous site for Cape Town, called, perhaps, “Izit Cape Town?” in which we would learn typical words and gestures native to the Mother City.

Now, the French marketers have done it again. The French tourism site is using the ad below that focuses on the Rugby World Cup, with just a tad of man-to-man waggishness in the scrum, to show the world that Paris is the place to be for this sporting event …and is also the capital of humour.  Compare this to the macho Sasol Springbok rugby ad. How could we use the 2010 Soccer World Cup to promote destination Cape Town? What we need is an aggressive marketing campaign that has the clarity of champagne trickling over ice cubes and some serious out-of-the-box thinking to awaken what we all know could be the crouching tiger of tourism. Let’s start talking.