The Garden Route is open for Business!
Ask anyone outside the region what the Garden Route is all about and they will tell you it is a place of beaches, lakes, rivers, mountains and forests. Ask them about the business that happens in the region and they will give you a blank stare.
This is the single biggest obstacle the region face in growing the local economy. Overcoming this must be the first step in any economic development initiative planning on attracting more business to the region, even tourism business.
In recent industry workshops run by the George Municipality it became clear that all the key industries in the region (Tourism, Manufacturing, ICT, Agriculture / Agri Processing) want to do better collective marketing and is dependent on business coming in from outside the region.
I propose that we create a single marketing message that goes out with all communication, for example
- marketing material
- invoices
- quotes
- correspondance
- rates bills
- websites
- email signatures
- etc
Something like “The Garden Route is open for business“ should do the trick.
This statement can easily be backed up by real data on the regional economy, which includes diverse industries such as airplane manufacture, electronics R&D and development, medical research and serious agri processing.
A clear and concise web page with the relevant background can be used to get the message across. Simple, do-able, quick to action and with massive impact.
4 thoughts on “The Garden Route is open for Business!”
Why not capitalise on the image of the Garden Route and decorate the slogan with words like “bloom”, “grow”, “green”, “flourish”, “sun”, “village”, “quality”
“The Garden Route: Business’ place in the sun”.
“The Garden Route: Where money grows on trees.”
“The Garden Route: Where business grows like black wattle” 🙂
“The Garden Route… Growing our future.”
Excellent intiative! Keep up the good work.
@Rudie We want to make it clear the region is serious about business, so would prefer to stick to a serious slogan. Introducing grow, green or sun puts us back in the non serious category.
@bevmerriman Yes, we want to create a ‘marketing kit’ of sorts that all in the region can use. Still to early to tell what it will contain though
Further to this, in the #paca workshops we identified the need for an ICT product / skills catalogue, to be used when promoting the region as an oct destination.
We want to use a truely unique and innovative approach with the catalogue.