The Daily Herald understands the process is underway to abandon the initiative to rebrand the destination that was launched in October 2009 and has won St. Maarten's PR firm Tambourine two awards for its innovative approach.
Multiple sources confirmed to this newspaper that the St. Maarten Tourist Office is busy with artwork and other supporting aspects, reportedly to revert to the original marketing theme St. Maarten had used for several years prior to 2009.
Branding themes such as "Delightfully Dutch, Fantastically French" and "A Little European and a Lot of Caribbean" reportedly will take centre stage again in the new approach. There also is talk of possibly combining the new and old strategies, but this could not be confirmed.
Dubbed an "edgy, creative strategy and approach" to marketing the St. Maarten in the North American market, the 2009 re-branding was launched under the leadership of Tourism Bureau former head Regina Labega and then-commissioner of tourism Frans Richardson, who personally launched re-branding in New York.
The intention of the new "edgy" approach was to differentiate St. Maarten from the other Caribbean destinations. Notably absent from the images were the typical Caribbean scenes of steel pan, palm trees, coconuts, etc. Instead, marketing and branding firm Tambourine chose to present a more intimate, emotional, personal concept for the island.
Another aspect was the use of misspelled adjectives derived from the double A (so AA) in the Dutch spelling of St. Maarten. The double A is splashed across promotional paraphernalia describing the St. Maarten experience as "Chaarming," "Sensaational," "Maagical," "Enchaanting" and so on.
St. Maarten's Dutch PR firm also used the theme.
Tambourine's rebranding efforts for St. Maarten reportedly were considered so successful that St. Kitts contracted the firm to redevelop its Website and "look," and the company has won awards for its work for both St. Maarten and St. Kitts. The rebranding also was touted as the primary reason St. Maarten recorded an eight per cent increase in arrivals the year after it had been launched.
In this context it is unclear why government would abandon the branding campaign, whether budget was a factor, whether the campaign actually had a "workable deadline" whereby certain targets had to be met, or whether government was not satisfied with the overall direction of the branding.
However, it is known that some stakeholders in the private sector were not in favour of the rebranding when it was launched. There were murmurs at the time that the new approach was not sufficiently reflective of St. Maarten and/or its people and of its two signature calendar events, Carnival and the Heineken Regatta.
Efforts to elicit comments from government and Tourism Bureau officials were not successful on Monday.
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