Q&A: Sally Cavanaugh, Cavanagh takes tourists on high-tech highway to Vermont

Vermont Business Magazine, Mar 01, 2002 by Smith, Robert

Sally Cavanagh, 47, has served with the Department of Tourism and Marketing since 1997, becoming commissioner in July of last year. She took over in the midst of sweeping changes in bow tourism and marketing operates, and just weeks before the events of September 11 impacted national and international travel in a massive way. Much of the discussion that follows centers on the technological changes taking place in marketing, and the aftermath of the events of last September.

Originally from Staten Island, Cavanagh began living in Vermont fulltime in 1969 when her family moved permanently to a farm they owned in Middlesex. She attended Harwood Union High School and graduated from Lyndon State College. Today, she and her husband live in a house on the same Middlesexfarm where she grew up. They have two grown children.

After college, Cavanagh worked for five years as a free-lance journalist, helped her husband run a framing business, and eventually served as press coordinator for the Democratic party in early 1990s.

Robert Smith interviewed Cavanagh in her Montpelier office, a short distance from the state capital building, on February 1.

VBM: To begin with, I'd really like to get an overview of the department of tourism, what it does, and how it's integrated with the other departments in state government.

Cavanagh: The role of this department is to portray the brand identity of Vermont to the outside world, to the global marketplace. Increasingly, while this department's role has remained primarily the same, it's strategies to meet the objective of that mission have changed dramatically in the last five to seven years. The advent of the Web has obviously changed the way consumers access information and we had to pay attention to that.

With the need for information to be up to the minute, up to date, and accurate, we needed to change the way we collected that information. We needed to improve the partnerships we had both at the state level and at the regional level in order to get that information together for consumers.

So technology has changed, ways to shell, I'd say that what we do is coordinate those activities and the delivery of that brand identity to the consumer.

VBM: Can you give me an example of how things are being done in a different way than they were a few years ago?

Cavanagh: A few years ago the state was doing what it had been doing for 30-plus years - we were putting our message out to the marketplace via TV or print and then waiting for the phone to ring. We'd fulfill that query that came in over the phone with more information and particularly by mailing them more print information. That whole process could take weeks, and the consumer just won't stand for that anymore.

If you think about yourself as a consumer, how you access information, it's easy to understand the switch that has occurred. People's lives are more stressful now, they're moving at a faster rate, they have less free time. They're accessing travel information and making travel plans later in the cycle, the time between when they plan and when they travel is much, much shorter. They want that information on the Web. They don't have time to waste. A certain number of people do still call and do still follow that age-old method of getting information about the state, but the vast majority do not.

The phone call volumes - not just for Vermont , but all over the country - have gone down and down and down. This while our Web inquiries and our visitation numbers have gone up and up and up. So that's really the trend that we're now reacting to in our messaging.

What we do now is, we still use traditional advertising television, print, and we're getting into radio some - but we point everybody to the Web.

VBM: Where do you do most of the conventional advertising?

Cavanagh: This traditionally happens in our drive market. Print has gone out further than our drive markets, although with recent events and the recessionary times in which we're operating, we're pulling back our print to be more within the drive markets.

VBM: And your drive markets are?

Cavanagh: Television is running right now in New York, Boston, Hartford and Providence. Our print campaign goes to those four plus Philadelphia. By our print campaign I mean we take our Vermont Life Explorer, which we just published, and we do direct mail into households within those markets, 75,000 at a clip. These are households that have been identified by our research as the demographic that is most likely to want to visit Vermont and that does actually visit Vermont.

VBM: I interviewed Johannes Von Trapp of the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe last winter, and he commented that there's something like 68 million people within a day's drive of Vermont.

Cavanagh: That's right, the estimate is 65 million to 70 million people, and that's an unbelievable market. That's always been Vermont's profile, that it's within a day's drive of all these major metropolitan centers. That's more important now than ever, with a recessionary economy and especially since the events of September 11.