Are you overlooking a niche market opportunity in your community? 

Niche market opportunities respond to, or create, the invitation for consumers to connect with your product, program or service. The narrower you can define your offer, the better you understand the customer, the greater is your potential to succeed in a tightly defined sub-set of a mass market.

I like to think of it as a filter. Start with tourism for example – people travelling for a range of reasons be it leisure, business, or sporting events.  That brings us to sports tourism – people who travel with a primary motive to participate or watch a sporting event. Narrow this down a bit more and you find running tourism – people choosing destinations based on a primary or secondary motivator to enjoy running experiences. Then examine the running market who is travelling and voila you find - marathon tourism - globetrotters who travel the world to enjoy marathons as a participant or supporter.  In fact a friend of mine ran her first marathon in Iceland, not her home country of Canada.  She combined her desire for an incredible fitness achievement with an incredible vacation destination.

Some people will be avid marathoners who select destinations for competitive purposes and to round out their ‘trophy destinations’ such as the Boston Marathon. Others love running marathons and use this as a reason to visit a new destination. What ever the motivation for the individual, there is a business opportunity for communities to consider.

Today in the Victoria Times Colonist  a wonderful article describes how the 30-year-old Royal Victoria Marathon has grown from a single race event with 750 people, to one that on October 11th, 2009 will attract 11,000 participants into one of four events (full marathon, half marathon, 8 km, and a children’s 1.2 km).  What an experience as a runner and a traveller to Victoria. This could be your community!  Your event!

Think about the business opportunity. This event now attracts 80% of its competitors from out of town. The local economic impact forecast is up to $6 million. Now that’s success!

So what does this mean to your tourism business? your community?

1.  Think about what types of major event or community festival complements your town, your assets. Victoria is renown for its number of per capita runners, training world-class triathletes like Simon Whitfield.

2.  Think about what your company, your community, and potentially hundreds of volunteers would be proud to be associated with, activities your local politicians would support, and affiliate organizations with whom you could partner.

3.  Think long-term and big picture. I doubt the 1979 organizers would have imagined the impact of this niche market idea 30 years ago.

4.  Think about what is needed as a catalyst for the organization, traditional and non-traditional partners, committees, governance structures, funding sources and even things like weather and time of year. Major events can be used to create new revenues, extend the season, rather than compete with existing activities and tourism draws.

5.  Think carefully about the risks and limitations, optimal size (upper and lower limits), have an exit strategy.

6.  Plan the size, shape and financial peramaters for your event in today’s economy, but ensure keep your eye on the future and ‘what if’ your event becomes as successful as the Royal Victoria Marathon?

7.  Be strategic. Major events, even highly niched ones can bring a tremendous amount of opportunity and profile to a community, they also are a great deal of work and require passionate commitment by a large number of people.

If you do champion a major event in your community, remember the most important element – carefully define your ‘ideal guests’ and then focus, focus, focus.

As many of you know Celes Davar and I are trained Climate Change presenters with Al Gore’s – The Climate Project. The first ever N.A. Summit of Climate presenters is taking place from May 14-16, 2009 in Nashville, TN, USA.

Celes and I are here.

This is a live blogging stream from the Climate Project Summit in Nashville, Tennesse. We hope to share some photos and text that brings the most important messages from this event to the Web in real time. We plan to share updates through the day Thursday eve thru Saturday, May 16, 2009.

This page will automatically refresh with news as we post it. Join in the conversations about sustainability – a critical component of travel and tourism experiences today.

Join the CTC for a web conference previewing plans for the economic stimulus programs targeting Canada’s emerging and priority tourism markets.

Date: April 29th, 2009

Time: 11:00 am (PT) | 2:00 pm (ET)

Presenters:

Andrew Clark, Vice President Market Development

Gisèle Danis, Executive Director, Strategic Marketing Canada Program

Siobhan Chretien, Executive Director, Americas

http://webcast.streamlogics.com/audience/index.asp?eventid=71981447

• Edge of the Wedge 17: April 20-22, 2009 (waiting list)
• Edge of the Wedge 18: April 22-24, 2009

Learn more at http://www.gmist.com/edge Learn about partnership, experience development and internet marketing and get inspired about tourism in your region.

• info@gmist.ca
• Call Natalie Lucier, Darlene Shears or Jackie Hiscock at Gros Morne Co-operating Association to register or learn more about this GMIST Edge of the Wedge Experiential Tourism training program: 709 458 2481

I have had the pleasure of being invited to make a presentation to the OECD’s Tourism Seminar February 26 – 27, in Bregenz, Austria. The seminar, entitled ” A New Design for Tourism: Culture, Tourism and Creative Industries. Driving Forces for Local Development” has been a mixture of innovative field trips, seminars, presentations, and local experiences.

This is my first time travelling in Europe. As a result, I see things with very “innocent” and “first time” eyes. I am open to everything.

The seminar has taken place at the Festival House. at the east end of Lake Constance, in the small capital town of Bregenz in Vorarlberg, the western-most province of Austria. The virtual tour gives you a really great perspective of the location and gives a really good, state of the art approach to using virtual tours that really help you to see a facility from a new perspective.

The town has created one of the most amazing open-air stage concepts I have ever seen. An open air floating opera stage with associated seating sits on the water, along the waterfront of Bregenz. As an infrastructure approach to staged experiences, it offers several unique things through its Bregenzer Festspeile (Bregenz Festival) with a spectacular view 70 km west down Lake Constance.

• An inspiring natural setting looking down the 70km length of Lake Constance.
• A small town setting for a world class conference centre and open air, opera stage.
• An entertainment concept that does not appear to be commoditized, because the opera and the set changes from year to year. 2009 will present Aida.
• High attention to detail in the operation of the conference centre, the movement of people, and the opera stage. (spectacular setting, stage, natural view, and on a grand scale)
• Competitive positioning that offers: nothing like this in the rest of Europe; a focus on Vorarlberg’s reputation as a centre for architectural design and innovation in Austria.

You can learn more about this amazing experience in this video:

or visiting the Bregenz website.

You may not be the worlds greatest athlete, but you have the opportunity to participate in the worlds largest athletic event!  For 100+ days prior to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, 12,000 lucky Canadians will be selected, from a Canadian Wide Lottery, to carry the Olympic torch.  The Calgary Olympics saw over 6 million Canadians enter their name for a chance — your chance is now!  All you have to do is visit the site below and answer one question, provide some high level data about yourself, where you would like to carry the torch (2 choices allowed) and make a personal pledge to do something in your daily life to make Canada a better place to live.  So if you are interested — take five minutes!  If we talk about memorable life experiences — this could be one of them!

Carry the Torch