Background

The organization our group has chosen to conduct our project on is Sentosa Development Corporation (SDC). Specifically, we will be assessing their most recent marketing campaign ‘The State of Fun’ by comparing their stated goals and actual results.

To provide some context, the SDC was established in 1972 and is tasked mainly with overseeing the development, management and promotion of Sentosa island – one of Singapore’s key leisure destinations.

Before ‘The State of Fun’ was launched, SDC’s marketing campaign was centered around the slogan ‘Asia’s Favourite Playground’ which ran from 2008 to 2013. While the campaign had successfully attracted more visitors under this banner, the SDC management was also looking for ways to further grow local attendance. Thus, the challenge under the current ‘State of Fun’ campaign launched in 2014 is three-fold: To increase the proportion of local visitors while remaining attractive to key foreign markets such as mainland China, and involving as many island operators as possible.

Project objectives and research question

As the campaign is about to end its run in 2017, our group thought that it is a good opportunity to assess if the campaign has achieved its stated goals. We want to find out if the campaign has achieved its intended outcome via the employment of social media platforms. As it turns out, our preliminary analysis of visitor numbers shows that the proportion of local visitors as well as the total number of visitors have remained the same. Through our project, we seek to find out if SDC should tweak its social media strategy to achieve campaign goals, or to adopt a whole new campaign to better appeal to its target audience.

Proposed methodology

Our group intends to adopt a four-pronged approach in order to provide a robust analysis of SDC’s current social media strategy. The first approach entails the use of viewership metrics – as provided by Socialbakers – to analyze trends in community growth, page posts and interactions. Thereafter, we will use demographic surveys to obtain the general sentiment of the public. This will be supported by qualitative interviews to discuss the reasons behind these sentiments and investigate the existence of any discrepancy against SDC’s intended vision and why. Finally, we aim to conduct content analysis to determine the attitudes of SDC’s stakeholders.

#sentosa #thestateoffun

By: Eh Zhi Hao Dion, Cliff Tank Kian Guan, Yashanti Yap Siew Mei