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(Main picture) the visitor experience starts with The Great Hall; (above) the Weasley’s kitchen includes interactives; (right) the hand sculpted construction of Hogwarts Castle


DOMINIC WONG Marketing and


communications director


What’s your role? I set and implement the marketing, brand- ing, communication and advertising strategy. When I started in early 2010 I was the fi rst permanent employee of the Studio Tour, so my job was to build a brand from scratch and get people to understand what that was. I did research and focus groups to develop the content. Now my role includes reacting to feedback and issuing new PR stories to keep the buzz going.


What’s the marketing strategy? Our strategy is about raising awareness of what we are. We’re different from anything else in the marketplace, so we push those behind the scenes messages and the fact that we’re a brand new visitor attraction. We have three target markets: Harry


Potter fans, who we work with via websites and our global Warner Bros. teams who have that fan base in place; fi lm fans, who we use targeted media to reach and rein- force that the attraction isn’t just for Harry Potter fans – it shows how fi lms are made; and day-trippers and tourists to London. An additional target market is overseas.


Our website is in French, German and Spanish and we’re doing some digital activ- ity in Germany, France and America.


AM 2 2012 ©cybertrek 2012


What are the challenges? The Studio Tour is only accessible through pre-booking, which is a challenge because it’s not the norm. One of the main com- munication messages right from the beginning has been that you have to have a ticket before you can get on site. My personal challenge was that when


I started we had no name, logo or team. However, when you’ve got two brands like Warner Bros. and Harry Potter, and a new attraction in a new studio, there’s a lot of excitement. I saw it as a great challenge to create a brand that pulled all those mes- sages and ideals together.


How do you use social media? We’re doing really, really well – if I do say so myself! We had 75,000 Facebook fans before we’d even opened and now have more than 100,000. We encourage visitors to share their experiences via Facebook, TripAdvisor and our post-visit micro site. We have access to the British talent who


are responsible for the production and design of the fi lms. At the BAFTAS we were tweeting live from the red carpet and had


a photo of Daniel Radcliffe for our twitter feed, then news of the award the fi lms won. Our social media fans really respond to that. It gives us so much credibility and that extra differentiation between what we are and anything else out there.


How can you ensure people don’t confuse you with Universal Studio’s The Wizarding World of Harry Potter? We’ve been careful right from the start to make our positioning completely different. Our attraction is about the making of


fi lms and there’s a very clear difference. We’ve focused on pushing the behind the scenes element and use the director’s chair, set lighting and rigging in all our brand values and creatives to convey that. We give access to the tips, tricks and


secrets that go into the sets, such as the fact that the books in Dumbledore’s offi ce are covered phone directories. Or that the actors had to sit in their beds at an angle during the last fi lms, as they’d outgrown them. We pull the visitor back a few feet from what they’ve watched on screen, so they get to view what the cast and crew see.


Read Attractions Management online attractionsmanagement.com/digital 31


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