UK & Ireland Marketing Strategy

The 'home market' has always been of great importance for tourism in Scotland: 83% of all tourism trips to Scotland originate from the UK (2009).

The UK remains our biggest market in terms of volume of visitors (12.5 million) and value (£2.7 billion).

With this in mind, we market Scotland as a strong destination brand to the domestic holiday market, basing its strategy on wide-ranging and detailed consumer information - its 'consumer segmentation model'.

VisitScotland's UK Marketing campaigns focus on offering attractive products for the expanding short breaks market and also for the need to extend the tourism season.

Following consumer research into its advertising, VisitScotland has developed a new creative strategy and concept to encourage more people to visit Scotland in the coming years. The Surprise Yourself campaign supercedes the previous Perfect Day, Autumn Moments and Winter White campaigns.

Seasonal refreshes will be reflected through images, offers, on-line content changes and events.

We will be undertaking a range of jointly-funded activities with the following partners:

• Ryanair
• Aer Arann/ Aer Lingus
• Ireland West Airport Knock
• SNH
• Festivals Edinburgh

In order to turn the VisitScotland Brand into reality visitors need to be given a clear reason to come to Scotland now - to turn Scotland from a 'might see one day' to a 'must experience as soon as possible' destination.

To achieve this, we identify what people are specially interested in doing while on their visit and promote Scotland accordingly to these interests, highlighting events, the best time of year for these interests and added value offers from relevant tourism businesses, so that people are prompted to visit now.

These interests have been grouped together in our 'Product Portfolio':

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