Stakeholder engagement: that’s not on our chart of accounts …

Plotting a new course in any industry is never easy. If you’re the early adopter or the leader of the pack, it’s compounded even more so by the structures and processes we have in place as businesses.

In the early part of the last decade, some tourism destination organizations shifted to more engaged, more locally relevant, and more dispersed models of destination marketing and management.

One of the challenges faced by the leaders of these organizations was how to shift the allocation of resources from a pool predominantly based on the purchase of consumption of media to one that allowed speculative expenditures in nontraditional partnerships and initiatives.

Annette Rummel, CEO of Great Lakes Bay Regional Convention & Visitors Bureau, is one of those innovator-outliers. For more than three decades, she has been blazing new paths in Michigan for tourism destinations to become more relevant, more local, and more integrated with their communities.

Having worked on everything from Frankenmuth to DestinationNEXT and all points in between, Rummel is a broad thinker, an innovator, and a friend of the industry. 

Enjoy our discussion about 30 years of fascinating and difficult development and how you actually get something done when it literally “isn’t on your chart of accounts.”