October 13, 2003
In a live interview with SAFM's Jeremy Maggs on Sunday, Mandy Jean Woods, the Director of Marketing and Tourism in Joburg, gave a frank assessment of the campaigns and projects currently underway in the city
JEREMY MAGGS:
The City of Joburg has been listed as the country's favourite city. Well, I'm hearing people say "Amazing! How on earth did we manage to achieve it?" Let's get a view on this now as Mandy Jean Woods, Director of Tourism & Marketing at The City of Johannesburg, joins us. Mandy Jean, I understand we find you in a very interesting location today.
MANDY JEAN WOODS:
Yes, I'm in the middle of Orlando Stadium, preparing for the FIFA technical visit, which is on the 30th of October and the first week of November. I think Joburg is going to play a pivotal role in that. We're here with the City Manager, the Chief Operations Officer and all our different heads, to ensure that when they come around everything is in tip-top condition.
JM:
What are you actually looking for this morning?
MJW:
We're checking the stadium and we're looking at things like the cleanliness of the area, looking at access routes, making sure they're free and open, and so on. There are hundreds of facets. I think that, in general, people in the city will notice a huge amount of effort around that kind of basic stuff. We've managed to maintain this, and I think that coming back to the award you mentioned, one of the reasons for that is that the product is working, the product being the thing we deliver, which is the services, the roads, the cleanliness of the city and so forth.
JM:
Well, I'm going to throw a couple of other words at you. I'm also going to throw words like 'polluted'; I'm going to throw out words like 'unfriendly', 'crime-ridden' and 'obsessed with money'. How do you think Johannesburg managed to do this?
MJW:
What I've found since I've been in this city, which is the last two and a half years, is that people have a perception that's developed as of the last 10-20 years, about Joburg being 'crime and grime'. And what we've found is that, as we've begun to tackle these particular issues, and we now start taking people around the city, to show them this and that, that they turn around in that perception, and not just 100% but 200%. And I think that what often happens is that we communicate badly to people in terms of what we're doing. But also, even if you do communicate, people sometimes say, "Yes, well, that's what they say, but I'm not sure", but then, when you physically take people who've never been to the city, who haven't been downtown for ten years, taking them and saying, "Look, this is what we've done," the impact is instant.
I'll give you an example... There's a square in downtown Joburg that had its business occupancy around the square at around 30% ahead of the upgrade we've just completed, and the occupancy there now is 100%, and people are still looking for space. And businesses are choosing to go back in and to be there. When I joined the council two and a half years ago there was only one restaurant in New Town. There are now about five. Restaurants wouldn't be there if people weren't coming, and if they weren't making money. So there's been that kind of turnaround - but I think it hasn't quite come through. Part of what we want to do now is to actually begin to drive those kinds of campaign that begin to tell people that you can do this.
JM:
Now, Mandy Jean Woods, I might have irked you two weeks ago... I made the point that in The Financial Mail there is some confusion over the brand of either Johannesburg or Joburg. I know an expensive re-branding exercise was undertaken to rename the city to Joburg from Johannesburg. I'd suggest to you that nothing much has happened.
MJW:
In one way it has and in another it hasn't. I agree with you that more could be done. Sometimes it's a case of government and public funding. But we have had an incredible opportunity in the last twelve months, with the World Summit and with the cricket, to actually launch that brand. The fact that we've got that kind of recognition without having actually conducted formal campaigns says something to me. I think in an informal way the brand has been promoted through the kind of work that the city does. We're touching an enormous number of people around the work we do in terms of hosting visitors and so on, and I think that has helped. But I do recognise the need to tackle it in a more organised way, if you like. So, in fact, from 1st October the city has appointed Open Trans-Communication as its agency for the next three years, and we've set aside around R25 million for that, to specifically drive campaigns that help to build the brand and talk about the kind of work we're doing.
JM:
And how, specifically, are they going to do that?
MJW:
Well, we've structured our marketing strategy into two core pillars. The one is Joburg - the space, the place we live, work and play in - and the other is Joburg the council, and the services that it delivers. And the third element is Joburg - the business community, the economic hub of the continent. And we're looking at those three pillars to drive particular campaigns. For example, one of the things we think we're really ripe for is to have a civic pride campaign where Joburgers tell us, in many ways, that they're proud of their city, they love their city, they like what's happening in it, they're so glad that there's been a turnaround, and that their perceptions are changing. And I think this award we won - which is basically a polling of the equivalent of 28 million South Africans - begins to tell us that people want a way to express their pride in their city. So this Civic Pride Campaign is going to be one of our very first campaigns.
JM:
Thanks very much indeed to Mandy Jean Woods, Director of Tourism & Marketing at The City of Johannesburg.
Originally published in the Marketing Web website
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