Five Questions with Ben Cober from PGAV Destinations

Five Questions with Ben Cober from PGAV Destinations

At Atomicdust, we’re lucky to partner with brilliant business owners and marketing professionals. Our clients and partners span various industries — from healthcare, to restaurants, to professional services and consumer goods — and with each project, we learn as much from them as (we hope) they do from us.

In this series, Ben Cober, the Director of Business Development and Research for PGAV Destinations, shares his greatest marketing successes and the risks he’s taken that have paid off.

How do you approach marketing? What’s your marketing philosophy?

Destination design of zoos, museums, theme parks, aquariums, resorts, and branded destinations is a collaborative endeavor. As a B2B business, we strive to bring new and exciting insights about our clients’ guests and market to the table as we work together to design new and remarkable attractions.

As one of the world’s largest and longest-running destination design firms, guests insight is our passion. We use the strongest assets of different types of attractions around the world to create the newest and most fulfilling experiences to meet the demands of today’s guests.

Our marketing philosophy is to cultivate lifelong relationships with fantastic destinations to help them grow over the course of our own careers and beyond, celebrating their successes in the process.

What has been your most successful or favorite marketing effort? Why do you think it was successful / a favorite?

We’re always looking to continue to add value to our clients even outside of regular project engagements. One of the most recently successful marketing endeavors we’ve celebrated is the research and publication of our inaugural Voice of the Visitor: Outlook on the Attractions Industry report.

It shares the findings of a national survey of Americans, their travel trends in 2015, and what their intentions were for 2016. It’s the only industry publication of its kind to share insights directly from the consumer.

It uncovered insights on nearly every attraction type in America, and we’ve received resoundingly positive feedback on it. We are currently about to launch the study that will fuel 2017’s report.

On the flip side, what is the biggest risk you’ve taken? What did you learn from it?

This year we presented a giant, purple elephant puppet in the St. Louis Mardi Gras parade. As part of our annual conservation awareness campaign, we had been researching and conducting activities to help slow (and hopefully eventually stop) the illegal ivory trade, fueled largely by the illegal poaching of African elephants.

The endeavor was a risk in that it could attract negative publicity (being a political as well as environmental issue) and that the elephant required significant volunteer time from our staff.

But the elephant puppet became an exciting, team-unifying, energizing project. We garnered significant local media coverage about it and it actually helped encourage MO House Representative Jeanne Kirkton to introduce House Bill 2747  to ban the sale of illegal ivory in Missouri.

We learned that these projects not only have a galvanizing effect on our team, but we can truly make a difference in our state as well.

What do you think is the most significant marketing challenge facing your industry today?

Due to agreements with our clients, the destination creation and strategic business consulting our designers provide is often confidential. Therefore, the greatest marketing challenge is to communicate our value without being able to show the majority of, and often the most impressive examples of, our work.

What is the most helpful business book or resource you’ve come across?

The good, ole-fashioned, hard copy American Alliance of Museums Annual Directory is a fount of knowledge that, when creatively analyzed, can provide a wealth of insight into the American museum, zoo, and aquarium market.