What do we mean by the Plymouth Offer? Quite simply the unique, emotional and benefit related selling points that will make our city memorable, desirable and compelling to its residents and the rest of the world.

Let’s start with the end in mind. Plymouth will represent everything that’s great about the South West. Plymouth people will be proud to say they live here. People from all over the country and the rest of the world will understand what Plymouth’s unique offer represents and see it as a must visit, must live in, must learn in, must work in and must play in city. Plymouth will be a place to build new and grow existing business.

To achieve the above, we need to develop a Plymouth Offer that we can use to help the city compete for its share of wealth and talent. It must be able to recruit the best people, attract more visitors, investments and events and create pride and self belief amongst its people and businesses.

The Offer is a promise of value; it embodies the things we want to achieve not just a logo and a tag line. It will reflect the reality of the city. A promise that must match the reality if Plymouth wants to achieve its Local Strategic Partnership Vision:

By 2020 Plymouth will be recognised as one of Europe’s finest, most vibrant waterfront cities, where an outstanding quality of life is enjoyed by everyone and all can be healthy, wealthy and wise.

It needs a Plymouth Offer that has vision for the future: we need to set certain ‘goals’, to be the UK’s centre of expertise for the marine sector, ‘The City of Devon and Cornwall’, the next silicon valley, the most desirable UK city to live in, have the number one UK University, be recognised world wide as a tourist destination and a city of creativity and culture, and only then will it be one of Europe’s finest and most vibrant waterfront cities. Once we have evolved the Plymouth Offer, we can then use it to market our city.  Every report and perception study says the same thing; we need to market our selves in a professional and joined up way.

Other cities have already created their offer and have been marketing themselves for a number of years, including Glasgow with the tag line ‘Scotland with style’. They launched their offer back in 2004 and have increased its annual hotel occupancy level from 68.8% to 75.3%. Tourist expenditure has also increased by £62 million and the website traffic has increased by 190%. Convention bookings increased by 8% to £148 million, conference hotel bookings secured a gross sales increase of 25% taking them to 3 million; this represents 1.1 million bed nights and expenditure of £129 million. Finally 31% of the UK target audience of 10 million were more likely to visit Glasgow as a result of brand advertising.

Plymouth needs to get its act together if it wants to start catching up. We have the expertise within this city to do this and things have changed on the ground, we have lots to market ourselves on. We all need to be agents of spreading the Plymouth Offer but we need to know what the Plymouth Offer is first. We live in a beautiful city with in an amazing natural location between the sea and a national park we just need to let other people know what we now have. We need to change the perception of an old naval port and dockyard to a thriving university city which has the potential to become a city of creativity and with the right connectivity our location can become an advantage not a disadvantage. The economy has changed from one of manufacturing to one of ideas; this is Plymouth’s opportunity to become great again.

Mervyn Orchard – Director

John Downie joined us after completing a work experience placement with our digital team. John graduated from the University of Plymouth in Business Information Management Systems and has joined Bluestone360 as a Digital Developer. With widespread digital knowledge, he provides central web and multimedia support, working at the forefront of many of our major projects.