VisitScotland's international marketing team

Foreign nationals play a critical role in promoting Scotland overseas through VisitScotland's international marketing team.

The national tourism organisation employs a number of different nationalities in its 34-strong international marketing team, including Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Swiss, German and French staff.  Their job involves consumer marketing and travel trade marketing, where they work with overseas tour operators, travel agents, retail agents and travel companies including airlines and ferries to raise Scotland's profile as a business and leisure destination.

"Language and language capability is really important for us in terms of relationship building with these key accounts," explains VisitScotland's head of international marketing, Denise Hill.

"While many of them have very good English, speaking to them in their own language helps with true relationship building and really getting to know them."

Language is also important in areas like training, Denise continues. When Po Ling Lee, Marketing Executive in the Emerging Markets team, goes to Hong Kong to train airline staff from Cathay Pacific in selling Scotland as a destination, for example, she might be addressing a room or 20 or 100 people, so being understood and getting the right messages across are vital.

Having multi-lingual staff in-house also helps VisitScotland ensure its translations for international markets of online and printed material are exactly correct in terms of content and tone. This is particularly important to convey the precise positioning and proposition of campaigns that are tailored to appeal to different countries, for example to unlock the Swedes' love of golf, Spain's interest in touring and France's penchant for city breaks.

"Our native speakers will review this copy and know exactly whether they are absolutely correct in terms of the brand message or if they don't quite hit the mark," Denise explains. "At the end of the day we have tight budgets so we can't have a scattergun approach. We must have a highly targeted approach and seek to extract the optimum value from every communication."

Cultural awareness is another crucial element that VisitScotland's international recruits bring to the team. "When they're quite fresh (to Scotland), they're great at knowing how consumers in their countries would react to things and what media they use, for example what they watch on TV and what magazines they read. That helps us understand how people in their country would react to the messages we're putting out and to different styles of approach."
The ability to see Scotland as others see it is hugely valuable and helps VisitScotland identify what motivates international visitors, Denise adds.

"We as Scots may sometimes question the use of icons like whisky and tartan, but our native speakers help to keep a visitor's perspective on what will be motivating for prospective visitors from their countries".

VisitScotland's international marketing team sources its recruits through agencies, online recruitment campaigns, referrals from overseas contacts and internal promotions from local Tourist Information Centres.

Excellent spoken and written English are key requirements, alongside marketing and/or trade marketing experience. The organisation provides language training where needed in English for Business or other foreign languages and also provides specialist training where required in areas such as negotiation skills training and media training.

Other members of VisitScotland's international marketing team are Tatiana Danilova, a Russian national who is a Marketing Executive in the Emerging Markets team, and Marie Bouldoires from France who joined VisitScotland as a Marketing Executive in the Southern European team from the Tourist Information Centre in Princes Street, Edinburgh.

Outwith the international team, many nationalities are employed across the Tourist Information Centre network, where the language fluency is a great advantage. VisitScotland's Business Tourism Unit, which promotes business and conference tourism, also employs Yulia Kovanova, a marketing executive from Russia recruited through the Fresh Talent Working in Scotland Scheme.

Contact

VisitScotland
Ocean Point One
94 Ocean Drive
Edinburgh EH6 6JH

T: 0131 472 2222
W: www.visitscotland.org/about_us/jobs.htm