New Ideas and Creativity | Travel Research Online

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New Ideas and Creativity

Where are new ideas born? Sometimes it can seem like all the good ideas are gone and that the energy has drained out of your travel practice. The truth is, however, you have not even scratched the surface – the universe has no limit to the possibilities for you and your enterprises.  But creativity requires time to think around your business, not on your business.  Our proximity to the day to day mechanics of our travel practice can make it hard to obtain a clear perspective. There are a few very dependable techniques you can count on to pump new energies into your thinking and to generate some new ideas for marketing. Here are a few tips:

  1. Relax – take some time off. Take the weekend and relax. Get together with friends, hang out with the family. Read a good book. Forget about the office and marketing and your business plan. You will come back to your work with a fresher perspective.
  2. Read consumer travel magazines – What to know what consumers are thinking about in travel? Consumer travel magazines are filled with excellent examples of marketing that large companies have spent tens of thousands of dollars researching and producing. There is no lack of good ideas there.
  3. Read non-travel magazines – Oprah, Mens’ Journal, The Economist. Magazines will keep you current in the spirit of the times. They are terrific resources for assisting you in getting into a new frame of reference, for seeing what the rest of the world is thinking. Magazines for other professions will likewise provide interesting insights into how other industries have handled important marketing, economic and cultural issues.
  4. Look Globally, Think Locally. Look at some of the big online travel sites. What are they doing to engage their audience? How could you replicate those same tactics at a local level? Sometimes the best ideas are not new ones – they are borrowed.
  5. Ask a kid – I kid you not. The more people you know ages 9 to 21, the more likely you are to learn something new about the spirit of your culture that can be used in shaping some aspect of your travel marketing. In the mind of a beginner there are many possibilties, in the mind of the expert, only a few.

Don’t discount any possibility out of hand. When you have a new idea, sit with it for a while. See if it still looks viable a week from now. If it does, you may just have a new insight to raise.


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