Boosting Seoul's Brand Value

The city expands its marketing campaign budget 10-fold to 40 bln won last year to build up image under new slogan,"Infinitely Yours, Seoul."

Seoul City kicked off its marketing program to boost its brand value among the world's major cities last year. To wage the extensive campaign directed by Yoon Young-suk, head of the city's marketing department, it increased the annual marketing budget last year from 4 billion won to 40 billion won, which will stand out among the city's revolutionary moves to change the image of the capital of Korea.
Seoul Metropolitan Government is determined to go to any length to build its image and brand value as a culture/design/creative city. Section Chief Yoon, who has a master's degree from Duke University, is in charge of running the campaign to help Seoul reemerge as a city where traditional culture meets high-tech in the modern era. Following are excerpts from his recent interview:
Question: Seoul City increased its overseas marketing budget 10-fold, from 4 billion won to 40 billion won in 2008, in what can be called a revolutionary way. What was the purpose behind such a drastic increase in the budget?
Answer: We have been conducting a city marketing campaign to boost the brand value of Seoul in line with the stiff competition among major cities throughout the world, and unless we do that, Seoul will be left out in the cold, unable to survive the intense competition.
Seoul's position in Korea is overwhelming, but Seoul has to do something in the way of boosting its image and brand value in the context of the triangular competition set up among China, Japan and Korea unless it wants to drop out of the race and fall behind. We certainly don't want that to happen.
What we want is to upgrade the city's brand value and, at the same time, attract an increasing number of foreign tourists to Seoul through the marketing campaign. Seoul's tourism industry ratio against the Gross Regional Domestic Product is somewhat below 7 percent, compared to over 10 percent for other major cities in the world. We are in a period of so-called 'growth without job growth,' as most factories are automated and no matter how large they grow, they don't generate jobs.
But tourism is a traditional service industry and if it grows, it creates jobs and a high economic effect. In the area of foreign direct investment, too, there is a view that unless foreign capital and talented people are attracted to Seoul, it will fall behind in the competition among cities.
In order for Korea to develop, it should create wealth overseas and bring it into Seoul to let it flow down to the local provinces under a circulatory system.
But now, as most companies maintain their head offices in Seoul, wealth created in the country flows back into Seoul again, which is euphemistically called the general goose theory. When geese fly in formations, the general goose leads them at the front.
In an economy, there are no frontiers. Many hedge funds, like capital and professional people, move from city to city and create wealth and keep those cities competitive. This goes to show the critical importance for Seoul to have a competitive edge with brand value as a base, creating value for investments to help Korea grow as a state.
Q: In conducting marketing for Seoul, you first must have target customers and develop concepts to be delivered to those customers. Who are the target customers?
A: I set the boosting of Seoul's brand value and the attracting of tourists and investments as the major purposes of the marketing program. Boosting the city's brand value will be targeted at the entire world. The slogan for our 2009 campaign is "Infinitely yours, Seoul" to express that any foreign visitor to Seoul can have unlimited cultural experience. As Korea depends on exports for more than half of its economic growth, raising the brand value of Seoul is like boosting the value of 'Made in Seoul' products. Attracting foreign investment, too, will have to be done with all of the countries of the world in mind.
For attracting tourists, however, major countries in Asia will come under the campaign, namely China, Japan, and Southeast Asian countries. We will also go further out to the Americas. Asia will make up 70 percent of our target market, while the rest will be in other countries. As a result of our campaign last year, the number of foreign tourist arrivals in Seoul increased 7 percent in 2008 over the previous year. In January, the number of foreign tourists in Seoul expanded 25.3 percent YoY.
Q: What are the concepts that you plan to deliver to consumers?
A: We plan to make the world fully aware of Seoul's advantages over other cities, such as it being a leading IT and high-tech city with a modern sense. We will also not forget to include the message that Seoul is the center of "Hallyu," the Korean cultural fad that swept Asia, or to tell the world that Seoul is a cultural city steeped in tradition handed down for centuries.
Korean TV shows and entertainers, mainly film stars and singers, have been the medium to spread the Korean cultural wave throughout Asia, boosting the image of Seoul in the process. The cultural image of Korea conveys the feeling that this nation is trendy and Seoul is the city that leads the fashion and design world, and we will try to impress these images on the world during our global marketing campaign. Seoul has been recognized as an Oriental city in the Americas and, therefore, the slogan 'Soul of Asia' was created to tell foreigners that they can truly come to experience all things Asian in Seoul, where the cultural heritage is preserved and the people and social culture are still full of these influences.
This doesn't mean that we will neglect the city's image as a cluster for the IT industry. As Seoul is known as the city for IT, high-tech and "Hallyu" to an extent, we have been employing both IT and traditional sectors in our strategies to upgrade the image of our capital. We have been stressing the traditional sector more than the general Asian sphere countries.
Q: Seoul has become a huge, complex city with a population approaching 10 million and, therefore, is likely to contain factors that can make up concepts for your brand campaign. Sometimes they contrast each other, making it hard to select the factors to be used in the concepts. How did you pick the factors for the concepts and what issues cropped up during the selection process?
A: Seoul has many things, but not many of them are so outstanding, thus we had a tough time narrowing the concepts down to two. Dubai has the Burj Dubai and Palm Island, Malaysia has nature and sandy beaches, Cambodia has Angkor Wat and Beijing has the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, easily creating concepts with one or two outstanding features. Marketing is simple and effective when you have only one factor to focus on, but Seoul is not so, making it difficult to sell.
When you take a look at what Seoul has to offer in detail, you will find the metropolis truly an attractive city in terms of culture, especially in terms of lifestyle. You can't say it in one word, but the city has numerous historical assets with many stories to tell and it is made up of people that are leading their times. This is the strength of Seoul. So we will put many attractive factors together to make many stories to tell the world, which is the approach to our marketing strategy.
Q: When you create concepts, you must have cities to benchmark the strategy of or to think of as competitors. When you compare Seoul with those cities, what are some of the factors that place Seoul in the same category with them or give it an advantage over them?
A: Mainly, those cities located closest to Seoul cannot but be competitors, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Tokyo. Those Asian cities have a tendency to show off their traditions and natural scenic wonders. We want to stress that Seoul has more than that; our strategies will show Seoul as an IT cluster in addition to a cultural center and, therefore, one can have a diverse experience here.
Seoul's differences will be included in our storytelling packages. Most cities try to sell themselves through PR campaigns using their own messages. But we would like to have the opinion leaders in various fields such as filmmakers Chen Kaige and Murakami Ryu, and musician George Winston, among others. Murakami Ryu has visited Seoul more than 30 times and knows Seoul very well and loves the city. Their stories provide insight to cultural matters in Seoul and cannot but have huge persuasive power.
Other remaining parts of the marketing program will take the same format, having foreign visitors talk about their experiences and the impressions they got in the bustling metropolis that is Seoul in the form of storytelling. Tourists from China, Japan and North America will talk about their experiences and impressions of Seoul in a natural manner, which is different from what rival cities have been doing in terms of concept and creativity.
Q: What are some other concepts for selling Seoul that you haven't mentioned?
A: In order for Seoul to be a global city, we have to maximize the quality level of human resources. The core of the matter is creativity and in order to boost their creativity, cultural factors should be stressed so they can have plenty of cultural experiences and encounters. This is why we often emphasize that Seoul is a cultural and creative city. European cities have emphasized creativity often in their public relations activities.
Korea has the potential to move ahead of others in the area of creativity, thanks to its superior cultural legacy. As the heat created from "Hallyu" has been translated into passion for Korean culture, the potential power of Korean culture is great. Therefore, 'the city of creativity and culture' make up a communication concept with enough margins.
Q: Concepts are important, but as important a matter is how they are communicated, as that will determine the customers' ultimate understanding. Can you tell us some of the strategies that were successfully implemented in 2008?
A: In 2007, we had only 4 billion won to spend for our marketing strategies, but the budget was increased 10-fold to 40 billion won in 2008 in an unprecedented manner by the Seoul Municipal Administration. The move showed the dire necessity for Seoul to boost its global image, which was understood both at home and abroad.
We were able to conduct a massive marketing campaign last year with such a large budget, which was used on TV commercials, newspaper ads, promotions, cultural sports marketing and tie-ups with other foreign media ― all of the marketing resources as were available. We studied what marketing strategies some of the cities more advanced than Seoul had employed to get where they are now and used strategies based on the study. So we made up for our lack of marketing campaign experience with sound strategies. We have been getting very good results from our efforts.
According to surveys conducted by AC Nielson on the popularity of Seoul as a travel destination for people in such neighboring countries as China, Japan and Thailand in May 2008 (with 2,100 respondents), August 2008 (with 1,200 respondents) and November 2008 (1,500 respondents), Seoul came out as the top destination respondents would like to visit within a year among all the popular cities for tourists in the world.
Our tourism marketing campaign really paid off, especially in China, a key target of the marketing campaign last year, which is important to note.
The most successful aspect of our campaign was that we tailor-made our campaign strategies for the specific targeted countries using a segregated creative approach. The strategy won high praise from the international advertising community and many cities wanted to benchmark the practice. The direction of our marketing campaign was expansive and comprehensive based on a high dimension. When looking at the results, we found that our approach to the target was very good in terms of method and it's been proven that the messages we conveyed through the marketing campaign were much better than those of rival cities.
Q: You said using a segregated creative approach by target made the marketing campaign a success. What were some of those creative approaches based on target and what were the targets?
A: Seoul's storytelling has been our creative strategy. Other cities wanted to show off their natural wonders and highly-valued historic relics as the concept to introduce the city. But Seoul made 13 different commercial films and used four of them in China, another four in Japan, three in Southeast Asia and two in North America, all tailor-made for a targeted market segment in those countries.
For example, ads on Korean TV drama series were targeted at customers in their 20s in China. The ads were designed to boost the overall image of Korea and deliver specific messages for different segments of the audience composed in a storytelling style. In the commercial films, people who visited Seoul told what they experienced, including the foods they enjoyed and other things interesting to foreign tourists that the city offers.
These days, individual self-guided tours are more popular than group tours, which show that many people prefer to have personal cultural experiences. Accordingly, foreign tourists who visited Seoul talk of their experiences in the city, along with what they thought were the most interesting aspects of their tours in Seoul.
For instance, to stress the high-tech areas of Seoul, CFs show people enjoying Wibro in the subways and show cultural scenes in Seoul for those who wish to experience cultural events. We didn't pack everything in each ad, but we chose what to show depending on the country, market segment and consumers' age group. For those in Southeast Asia and China, we made up concepts based on playgrounds in Seoul ― such as Lotte World ― as well as snowy scenes, because southeast Asia doesn't have winters like in Korea and they like to visit the playgrounds or theme parks.
We allocated 45 percent of the budget to China, as it is a large emerging tourism market, in addition to the country being a large importer of Korean goods and services. We also used localization strategy in that country. As a result, signs that our marketing campaign was successful emerged in such important cities as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Japan, too, has been a key source of tourist arrivals in Korea and so we allocated from 20 to 30 percent of the budget to attract Japanese to revisit Korea. Next was Southeast Asia. We used famous publications like Time and The Economist to sell Seoul as a tourist destination, especially on the economic and cultural aspects of the city, which are not that well known around the world.
The most important points driven home in those media were those of world-renowned opinion leaders testifying that Seoul is an advanced city, based on their own experiences. nw

Mayor of Seoul Oh Se-hoon

An artist's conception of what Yongsan Ward in Seoul would look like when the district is fully developed.

Various posters that Seoul City displayed at the New York Fashion Week held last year in New York, using photos of well-known figures who visited Seoul talk about their impressions of Korea's capital city.

Chief Yoon Young-suk of the Marketing Dep't of Seoul Metropolitan Government