Den Bosch Partners
Identify the right visitor personas for multi-day visits to the city
Translate persona insights into campaign narratives
Activate potential visitors, raise awareness and resonate with (internal) stakeholders
Mark de Greeff, Executive Director of Den Bosch Partners
Challenge and solutions
Challenge and solutions
What was the challenge you were facing at the time you decided to work with Glocalities?
In 2023, together with the Den Bosch's tourism partners, we crafted a bold new vision for the city’s tourism future. This vision centers on attracting more overnight visitors, marking a clear and exciting shift in our ambitions. To bring this vision to life, we sought a robust and universal segmentation model to understand this growing market better and lay the foundation for a powerful three-year strategy.
What motivated you to consider Glocalities as your business partner to help you with this challenge?
Almost by chance, we stumbled upon the Glocalities model during an online mini-marketing MBA from Marketing Week. It was highlighted as a prime example of effective segmentation, and it immediately resonated with us. The approach—analyzing markets through psychological and sociological characteristics—felt like a perfect fit.
As we delved deeper, we discovered that Glocalities is a Dutch research agency. Learning that the NBTC (Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions) was already leveraging this model sealed the deal for us. It is a huge advantage when national and local DMO’s (Destination Management Organizations) speak the same language. We knew we had found the right tool to guide our strategy.
What is the conclusion/insight that stood out to you the most from the research and project?
Our research, conducted with 1,500 respondents, provided a wealth of detailed insights on for instance booking and media behavior. However, two key findings stood out above the rest:
“With the values-based Glocalities data we had the right tool to guide our strategy.”
“With the values-based Glocalities data we had the right tool to guide our strategy.”
1. Among the five Glocalities mindsets, the Creatives-segment proved to be the most promising for Den Bosch. This group showed the strongest positive associations, the best product-market fit, and the highest intent to visit.
2. A second insight revealed a critical challenge in our sales funnel: while everyone seems to like Den Bosch, the city doesn’t spontaneously make it into the top five destinations when asked unprompted. We had a leak in the top of our funnel that needed repairing.
These two insights became the foundation of our new marketing strategy, ultimately leading to the launch of this campaign. The campaign was hugely successful partly due to the great insights from research.
How do you evaluate the Glocalities services? Did these meet your expectations?
The Glocalities research provided us with invaluable insights. One of the major advantages of Glocalities is their dedicated respondent panel, already segmented by the five mindsets. This allows for swift and precise research, targeting the right audiences. In the coming years, we’re certain we’ll be leveraging this resource
more frequently, and do more deepdives for relevant insights.