As I was watching CNN international I realized the efforts of several countries trying to leverage their brands. In a few commercials you can have a glance of a lot of marketing campaigns by India, Greece, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Seychelles, and a few others to leverage their country brand. Within all of these campaigns and besides many curious aspects surrounding these ads, what put me on thinking first was the opportunity Macau was missing.
The overall Macau campaign in different media is one of the least engaging, but worst is exactly the whole strategy and positioning which culminates in a campaign ending with the tagline: Macau, a world of difference, the difference is Macau. I believe this tagline says little, especially taking in account the competing diversity of multiple locations nearby and the opportunity it is missing if only could focus more on key brand differentiators.
As Macau thrived first and foremost with casinos, its tourism board believe in a complementary move into a shopping haven, where challenges come up here as visitors are the only ones who can keep up with multiple shopping malls and high end stores, and this is not the best of times. In my perspective, a wise strategy would be whether to continue focusing on the edge of the casinos and entertainment, or better complemented, exploring exactly what Macau as so different from many cities in Asia: the Portuguese heritage.
When neighboring Hong Kong gave away all the English glamour by destroying old buildings to give place to skyscrapers, Hong Kong was and is making a statement about becoming a financial and innovation center (as well as demonstrating careless about architectural heritage). Macau, so close to HK, should follow suit but on the opposite direction, to maintain and leverage its heritage. Macau grew to have a lot of casinos given the circumstances of a different law policy and geographical proximity to China, which is a differentiator and certainly attracts a lot of gamblers from China. But, as it looks to broad their range of tourism attractions and capture new audiences, they should exactly explore the Portuguese cultural heritage which is unique in the region.
Buildings are well preserved and people can experience the beautiful Portuguese architecture. Food is well known for who visits Macau, and is actually one of the most important reasons Hong Kong visitors go to Macau, to eat authentic Portuguese food in the middle of Asia. It’s true that Macau already enhances these aspects and the mixture between the old and new, but in their marketing campaign it is clear that this is not well communicated. Overall, there seems to be a poor brand strategy behind as well as marketing innovation, consequently steering off its focus from key advantages to missing out competitiveness in the region.
I believe that if countries or regions want to leverage other concepts rather than exploring their unique heritage (e.g.: Cambodia, Peru), culture (e.g.: India, China) and history (e.g.: Rome, Egypt), they better build something unique (e.g.: Dubai), have inherited a enviable landscape (e.g.: Fiji), or have created a dynamic and unique social environment (e.g.: Barcelona), otherwise you end up not standing for nothing at all, just like Macau.
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Both pictures are taken from 