Christchurch gets creative to lure Aussies
Christchurch will try to entice Australians back to the region through a quirky campaign designed to create a buzz around innovations springing up in the city.
Christchurch and Canterbury Tourism’s Christchurch Reimagined campaign follows recent figures which showed the city is still 70,000 short of the typical 400,000 annual arrivals from Australia (Travel Today, August 21).
The first phase, launched today, features three wacky video clips (see below) which follow Christchurch mayor Bob Parker on a tour of Australia’s Big Merino in Goulburn, Big Chook in Mount Vernon and Queensland’s Big Pineapple, Big Macadamia and Big Cow.
His mission is to persuade each town’s mayors and city officials to lend their “Big Thing” to Christchurch to encourage Australians to visit.
“Australia is a big country, full of people with big hearts and big ideas and big pineapples. They’re crazy about big stuff,” Parker explains in one of the episodes. “So we decided to ask if we could borrow some of these icons and put them around Christchurch to make our Aussie mates feel more at home in our place.”
The videos will feature on popular digital sites with an open letter of appeal to appear in Sydney and Melbourne newspapers today.
The second part of the campaign, the “Discovery Stream”, will launch in October to capitalise on interest generated by the first phase.
While the transportation of the Big Pineapple across the Tasman is likely to remain a pipe dream, a micro-site will showcase the actual “Big Things” that are taking place in Christchurch.
Reimagined.christchurchnz.com will incorporate real-time content from visitors and residents pulled from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts tagged with #chch. Local tourism operators will also encourage visitors to share their images.
Jetstar is supporting the campaign with sales fares of $119 one way from Sydney and $129 from Melbourne.
The sale will run from September 26 to September 30 for travel between October 24 and December 5.
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