The Hanoitimes - The Vietnam National Administration of Tourism VNAT has announced the new slogan and symbol of the Vietnam tourism promotion program for the new period of 2012-2015. As such, Vietnam has successfully chosen the way it will follow in the new stage of development, and what’s next?

“Vietnam – Timeless Charm” and the five petal lotus have been selected as the slogan and symbol of Vietnamese tourism in 2012-2015.

In principle, the event is expected to be followed by a lot of activities to popularize the new slogan and new symbol.

VNAT’s General Director Nguyen Van Tuan has confirmed this, saying o­n Thoi bao Kinh te Saigon that Vietnam would spend much money o­n advertisement campaigns to attract foreign travelers to Vietnam to discover the “timeless charm.”

Tuan said that VNAT is preparing for the implementation of the strategy o­n tourism development until 2020 with the vision until 2030. o­ne of the priority tasks of the strategy is building a tourism brand for Vietnam’s tourism. Therefore, the marketing and advertisement activities after a new slogan and symbol are chosen would be further pushed up.

Tuan has revealed that VNAT is joining forces with the EU experts to work out o­n the detailed programs to advertise Vietnam’s tourism, saying that the discussion would finish soon, so that the first steps of the program can be implemented right in 2012.

Like other countries, which always spend big money o­n the chains of marketing activities to be taken every time after they change slogan and symbol, Vietnam will also accept to spend money to promote tourism. Especially, Tuan said that unlike previously, VNTA would have enough money for marketing campaigns, including the designing of the campaigns and the implementation.

However, Tuan o­nly generalized that VNAT would seek money from the National Tourism Promotion Program and from other sources.

When asked if VNAT thinks of inviting showbiz stars or famous portraits in the world to Vietnam to advertise Vietnam’s tourism, Tuan said that this is really a good idea, but frankly said that Vietnam does not have enough money to do that.

“We don’t have financial capability powerful enough to invite the portraits to Vietnam,” he said.

In recent days, Vietnam welcomed the famous couple Brangelina, who came to Vietnam in a holiday. Most recently, the country received the Chief Executive Officer of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend o­n Christmas holiday. The information about the visit trips of the famous portraits o­n foreign media has partially made people think that Vietnam is a place that deserves to come.

Therefore, Tuan believes that it would be better to spend money o­n “more practical works”, such as attracting foreign press agencies which have representatives in Vietnam and Vietnamese newspapers printed in foreign languages and distributed overseas to join media campaigns.

“We will o­nly be able to think of other works when we have more money,” Tuan said, adding that when Vietnam o­nly has 30 billion dong a year to spend o­n tourism promotion campaigns, it should not think of using the images of famous portraits to attract foreign travelers to Vietnam.

Talking about the marketing solutions, Tuan said that running ad campaigns o­n Internet and social networks would be the priority work in implementing the tourism development strategy in the time to come. “We will need the experts who can help take full advantage of new technologies, especially Internet, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and we will spend money o­n this,” he stated.

“VNAT now has a tourism information center which specializes in managing the websites of tourism sectors. We will pour more money into the center to make it get adapted to the application of new technologies in popularizing Vietnam’s images in the world,” he added.