- Do you wish to inspire your team to think creatively, see opportunities instead of threats, rise above the daily challenges?
- Do you wish to give your team the tools and insights with which to make sense of their changing world and lift your organization to greater heights of productivity and excellence?
If yes, then contact us at speaking@desticorp.com. All presentations are tailored to your needs in terms of length and subject matter and are guaranteed to inform and inspire.
Recent Engagements
Forthcoming Engagements
Anna's new topics for 2009 include:
THE FUTURE OF TOURISM
Prospering Beyond the Recession: A Roadmap
As we pass from one unprecedented crisis to another – be it relating to food, climate, finance, biodiversity, climate change – it’s clear that we’re living through a period of deep and transformative change. Tectonic forces are rocking the foundations of our institutions, business and organizational models.
- How do tourism enterprises and their leaders make sense of such change and help their communities prepare for a very different future?
- How can tourism survive not just the recession but the shift to a fundamentally different business landscape?
- Can we seriously hold onto the notion that harnessing trends and making minor innovations to “business as usual” will suffice?
- How can we start to imagine what such a level of transformation might look like?
This engaging and controversial presentation is designed to illustrate the scale and complexity of change while providing the audience with some practical steps to future proof their organizations. Topics covered include.
- How did we get here – what forces are really at work?
- The Recession - Opportunity or Minefield?
- Carbon – the new currency
- Industry or Network? - why all marketing is social
- From Mattering to Caring
- Why and where to look for the greenshoots of recovery
- On Slowing Down Glocally – what does that mean?
- Quantum Leadership
Length: minimum one hour – ideally a half or full day event with interaction.
Target audience: persons with leadership inclinations and potential within DMOs, tourism-related associations and enterprises already engaged in community leadership.
WHY ALL MARKETING IS SOCIAL MARKETING
what to do now that the customer is in control
While business has paid lip service to the notion that the customer is king since mass marketing emerged in the 1950s, it is only now that customers are flexing their muscles and becoming aware of their own power.
As a strategist and researcher interested in the change forces affecting the way tourism is marketed and managed, Anna first began investing her time and intellect in the strategic implications of emerging information and communications technologies in the mid 1980s and has been privileged to be both and forecaster, observer, contributor and recipient of their impact since.
This lecture is designed for owner operators of small, medium sized businesses and regional Destination Marketing Organizations seeking a roadmap to guide them through the maze of jargon, trends and technology. Anna digs beneath surface trends to reveal the underlying forces driving change so that audiences can “join up the dots” for themselves and make discriminating choices relevant to their business and context.
Key topics include:
• How did we get here – what forces have turned conventional marketing upside down?
• Evidence of Customer Power as the New Reality
• The New Marketing Rules – Dancing with the Customer
• The Power of the Customer Experience
• The Nature of the Customer Experience – Going Full Circle
• And You Think You own Your Brand?
• Tourism Marketing as Content Management
• The Power of Community – what can we learn from the bees?
• Let the visitor speak – the power of co-creation
• What’s Coming next?
Length: minimum one hour – ideally a half or full day event with interaction.
Target audience: persons with leadership inclinations and potential within DMOs, tourism-related associations and enterprises already engaged in community leadership.
BEYOND SUsTAINABILITY
What Tourism Might Look Like in a Low Carbon Economy
The tourism industry has been talking up sustainability for over 30 years with interest and rhetoric rising during periods of expansion, boom and growth and often dwindling again when engulfed by recession, bust and contraction. Over that three decades, there Is little evidence that tourism , as a whole, has achieved either its own financial stability or contributed significantly to the environmental stability of the planet, the regeneration of ecosystems, or the stabilization of minority cultures. While this lack of success is not due to lack of intent or goodwill on behalf of the many devoted advocates of eco, responsible, geo, philanthropic or sustainable tourism, the reasons behind this lack of progress need to be understood.
In this presentation Anna Pollock argues that tourism is less close to achieving sustainability than it was when this concept entered the lexicon in the 1980s. She attributes this lack of progress to several causes:
An inability to “operationally define” sustainability such that progress towards or away from it can be measured;
Collective misunderstanding of the natural laws governing life on this planet;
A lack of appreciation of the full value of the tourism experience by sellers and buyers;
An under estimation of the costs and net benefits of tourism;
A business model that has become dependent on volume growth; and
Application of an industrial mindset that is applied to things not experiences
Thanks to concern about climate change, the emergence of carbon as both a currency and a constraint is providing both the opportunity and the need to create a new form of tourism that can exist sustainably in a low carbon economy. Unless the tourism community learns to reduce its footprint and develop a much deeper ecological literacy it will find itself adapting to significantly rising costs, increased government regulation and possibly even market withdrawal along with the adverse consequence associated with global warming and climate change.
In the second half of the presentation, Anna Pollock paints a picture of what tourism might look like in a low carbon economy; highlights the benefits of such a transformation; and outlines the five essential steps that businesses and destinations should take to get there.
Length: minimum one hour – ideally a half or full day event with interaction.
Target audience: persons with leadership inclinations and potential within DMOs, tourism-related associations and enterprises already engaged in community leadership.
