So much more Down Under

SYDNEY, Australia — Even if you’ve never visited Down Under, you can probably imagine it: ochre-red landscapes, sun-baked beaches and the occasional lizard or kangaroo. It’s the lazy “no worries” lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of — if only you could stomach the 24-hour flight.

The picture-postcard image of Australia harks back to countless tourism campaigns and hit films like “Crocodile Dundee” and “Mad Max.” It’s a cliche, of course. Australians actually work some of the longest hours in the industrialized world and most live in cities similar to Boston or Chicago with nary a reptile in sight.

Now, with visitor numbers dropping, there is a new realization that Australia needs to sell itself with more than just cliches. In an increasingly competitive market for tourism, business and trade — perhaps it’s time for something more sophisticated than a leathery-skinned Paul Hogan putting “another shrimp on the barbie.”

The Australian government is sufficiently alarmed that it recently announced a $20 million competition for a new marketing label to promote Australia overseas. Creative agencies are being encouraged to submit tenders. The winning bid — complete with a new catchphrase and logo — will be launched internationally in May at the World Expo in Shanghai. 

Meantime, Trade Minister Simon Crean has been out in the world pressing the point that Australia has won 10 Nobel Prizes and bursts with ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, but too often downplays its achievements.

“The tourists already know this is a great place to come and have a holiday”, he told ABC radio last month. “What we’ve got to convince people is [that] it’s a great place to invest, it’s a great place to come and be educated … to live … to build your business base from.”

The global economic downturn has certainly put the skids on visitor numbers. In the period July 2008 to July 2009, the total number of international visitors to Australia fell 4 percent compared with the preceding 12 months. Visitor numbers from Japan and Korea plummeted more than 20 percent. About 450,000 people visited from the U.S. — making Americans the third biggest group of tourists to Australia by country, behind New Zealand and the U.K. — yet this also represented a 2 percent fall.

Australia’s poor performance in the tourism market also highlights the embarrassing failure of recent campaigns.

In 2006, Tourism Australia poured 180 million Australian dollars into advertisements featuring a bikini-clad model posing the now-notorious question: “So where the bloody hell are you?”

In the U.K., authorities ruled that the word “bloody” was obscene and restricted airing of the commercial until after 9 p.m. Roadside billboards featuring the slogan were also removed. Canadian authorities objected to the word “hell”, while in Singapore, the slogan was modified to the comparatively vanilla: “So where are you?”

The Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, later described the campaign as an “absolute rolled-gold disaster.”

Then last year, Tourism Australia launched a new “Come Walkabout” campaign off the back of the Baz Luhrmann film epic, “Australia.” The only problem? Box-office figures for the film were less than epic. The global financial crisis also deterred people who were understandably more worried about their jobs and bank deposits going walkabout — hardly the ideal mood to contemplate an exotic trip.

Many marketing experts agree that Australia’s image needs an update.

Michel Hogan, principal branding advocate for the Melbourne-based Brandology, told GlobalPost: “Right now, Australia is known by its icons — the Sydney Opera House, the Harbor Bridge, Ayres’ Rock. If anyone knows anything about Australia, it’s that — and that we tend to have kangaroos. I used to live in the U.S. and it used to be hilarious — people would ask, ‘Do kangaroos really hop down the main street?’ The Australian government quite rightly wants to broaden that perception.” 

With the right approach, she suggested, Australia could become a “keystone destination” for international business conferences, edging out rivals such as Singapore and Hong Kong. “We really have to compete on parity as having credibility in finance and business.

That we’re not just a bunch of people sitting on a beach wearing flip-flops and drinking beer. There is a vibrant, innovative and industrious culture that is largely unknown”.

A big challenge for Australia will be settling on a label that is simple and catchy, yet manages to satisfy everyone. Paul Mayes, strategy director for advertising firm Whybin/TBWA, pointed to the success of South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” campaign — a reference to its youthful, multi-racial awakening following the scourge of apartheid.

He reserved highest-praise for New Zealand’s “100% Pure” — a tagline that evokes everything from the quality of Kiwi wool and dairy produce to the pristine forests and lakes featured in the “Lord of the Rings”. “It’s not just a tourism thing,” Mayes told GlobalPost. “That campaign has done New Zealand an awful lot of good in a whole lot of areas — trade, goods, services, culture.”

What about Australia? The trick, Mayes argued, was not to abandon its existing brand. ‘It’s a question of complementing it,” he said. “‘Where the bloody hell are you’ had its problems, but the whole ‘shrimp on the barbie’ did a very good job [conveying] the friendliness of the people”.

He continued: “Summarizing Australia is hard. The problem is satisfying different stakeholders – tourism people, winemakers, universities attracting overseas students, people trying to sell iron ore.”

“My worry is that they’ll end up with something that a lot of people disagree with. It’ll either be very crass or very ordinary”.