1. Identify the segmentation variable discussed in the case to classify potential tourists who vacationat Virginia Beach. Can you think of other variables that can group destination vacationers with common interests and attraction to Virginia Beach? Describe how such groups can be targeted. What role should social media play.

2. The case describes the target Virginia Beach vacationers as leisure travelers, meeting and convention planners, and group tour organizers/operators. Describe the marketing and media strategies Virginia Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau uses to target these groups.

3. Virginia Beach is described as a quality, year-rounded vacation destination. Yet the sports, entertainment, and leisure activities depicted on its website are all summer bound. Imagine a family is planning to vacation in Virginia Beach during the month of November. What recreational, sight-seeing, and cultural activities can you recommend to such a family?

4. Briefly describe how Virginia Beach could track its current customers/visitors and include database marketing in its strategic marketing activities. What data should it gather for its database? How can this data be obtained.

CASE: VIRGINIA BEACH TOURISM Do you like to travel? Do you enjoy taking a vacation? If so, you are among the millions or bil- lions or perhaps zillions of people who do! Tourism is a powerful industry that affects many different businesses, including hotels, restaurants, retail outlets, attractions, transportation providers, and meeting facilities. Virginia Beach travel and tourism (Figure 3.19) is big busi- ness . Tourism is also an industry made up of many different types of consumers with vastly different needs, wants, and desires to which tourism marketers must strategically appeal. This case is designed to help you to better understand how a vacation destination is able to segment its market to attract a wide variety of prospective tourists. The vacation 125 destination is Virginia Beach, Virginia, a place that literally has something for everyone. its marketing strategies must be customized and targeted to cater to each consumer However, in order to be effective in marketing to a diverse leisure traveler population, group's interests and desires. Before we discuss Virginia Beach's marketing strategies, let's take a stroll down its beautiful boardwalk and take a glance at Virginia Beach as a BUILD, DEVELOP, AND MEASURE DM STRATEGIES 11 C vacation destination Figure 3.19 Virginia Beach coastline. Used with permission of the City of Virginia Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau Why Visit Virginia Beach? A tourist favorite, the Virginia Beach resort area features a three-mile long, nationally acclaimed boardwalk along the Atlantic Ocean with a separate bike path-a combination perfect for strolling, running, biking, roller blading, renting a surrey, or just taking in the sights and sounds of the beach scene. Hotels, restaurants, unique shops, a fishing pier, and even playgrounds for the kids are all wrapped up in a park-like atmosphere that goes on for miles. Live musical and family-friendly entertainment is offered nightly during the summer months along Atlantic Avenue and at four oceanfront stages. Parasailing, jet ski rental, ocean kayaking, boat tours, and charter fishing trips are all available to tourists. Vir- ginia Beach offers numerous venues to engage tourists. For example, the 800,000-gallon Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center is one of the best aquariums and live animal habitats in the country, featuring river otters, harbor seals, loggerhead sea turtles, stingrays, and sharks as well as hundreds of hands-on exhibits, an outdoor aviary and nature trail, and a 3D IMAX theater. The primary target market for overnight visitation to Virginia Beach can be divided into two categories-final consumers and organizational consumers-each with its own subset of defined market segments. These include: leisure travelers (such as families, singles without children, sports enthusiasts, and the religious, and fraternal organizations, and more). tour planners. This case focuses on how Virginia Beach targets various prospective leisure LISTS AND MARKET SEGMENTS Who's the Target Market? mature market) travelers. Geographically, Virginia Beach concentrates its direct marketing efforts on prospective tourists in the Northeast region of the United States. This geographic region is important because the city's convenient location makes it only a day's drive for two-thirds of the nation's population. Therefore, the top geographic target markets include the following: . . Washington, DC Richmond/Petersburg, VA Roanoke/Lynchburg, VA Philadelphia, PA New York, NY Pittsburgh, PA Cleveland, OH Baltimore, MD Hampton Roads, VA Harrisburg, PA Raleigh, NC . Now that you know what geographical markets are targeted by Virginia Beach, let's explore how it customizes its marketing and media strategies to attract specific demographic and behavioral segments of tourists. Virginia Beach's Marketing and Media Strategy Virginia Beach employs a multi-media marketing strategy, including magazines, inter- active/online, broadcast television and radio, as well as select newspapers. Its market- ing strategy is designed to achieve two objectives: (1) to generate awareness of Virginia Beach as a quality , year-round destination; and (2) to drive traffic to its tourism websites, VisitVirginiaBeach.com and LiveTheLife.com. Virginia Beach marketers have used list- rental strategies to identify e-mail lists that might prove to be useful in connecting with prospective tourists. They have recently run a dedicated Virginia Beach e-mail campaign with lists from WeatherBug, e Target Media, iExplore, Orbitz, Sherman's Travel, Daily Candy, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC), eBrains, BUILD, DEVELOP, AND MEASURE DM STRATEGIES and The Baltimore Sun. Virginia Beach's Segmentation Strategy The secret to successful tourism marketing for Virginia Beach lies in its highly segmented marketing initiatives designed to drive prospective tourists to its easy-to-navigate website, and once there, enable each prospect to quickly locate the information of interest. This marketing strategy is uniquely customized and tailored to each demographic and behav- ioral consumer segment. Here's how it works: first, Virginia Beach researches each consumer market segment's desires and develops a series of creative messages tailored to each segment's professed desires regarding what each group lives for in a beach vacation. Next, Virginia Beach places advertisements with unique website URLs created explicitly for each segment in specific media vehicles that strategically reach each traveler segment. Then, when each prospective traveler visits the Virginia Beach website, he or she immediately views select Web pages containing vacation information about Virginia Beach that is of specific inter- est. For example, prospective sports enthusiast travelers will view the Web pages featuring photos and descriptions regarding the wide variety of sports events and activities offered at Virginia Beach, as presented in Figure 3.20. Of course, each prospect is free to explore the entire website as it is easy to navigate and chock full of information and enticing pho- tos and videos Figure 3.21 shows, the Virginia Beach advertisements that you find will contain messages BUILD, DEVELOP, AND MEASURE DM STRATEGIES Let's take a look at precisely how Virginia Beach targets each leisure traveler your friends. You might locate an advertisement and information about Virginia Beach on a So you are single, without children, and searching for a vacation destination for you and segment Singles Without Children travel website or via search engine optimization with Google, Yahoo/Bing or Facebook As tailored to your specific interests, such as taking a bike ride along the boardwalk . The ad encourages you to visit LIVEFORTHECRUISE.COM' to learn more about what a vacation in Virginia Beach has to offer you