Despite showcasing a majority of disapproval for the recent “Love the Philippines” tourism campaign by the Department of Tourism, a recent study from Capstone-Intel, a private research and intelligence company, revealed that about 40 percent of Filipinos expressed a “positive” response regarding the campaign.
Capstone-Intel is a high-impact research company that uses innovative research technologies, tools, and methods to convert data and information into breakthrough insights and actionable intelligence outputs. It is committed to helping its clients solve problems, find solutions, grow markets and constituencies, build reputations, navigate risks, manage crises, and be the country’s leading private research and intelligence agency.
‘Love the Philippines’
On June 27, 2023, the DOT unveiled the new tourism slogan titled “Love the Philippines,” which then replaced the current “It’s more fun in the Philippines” campaign that has been used by the tourism department since 2012 up to the first half of 2023.
Under the new slogan, the national government, through the DOT, seeks to uncover the many things to love about Philippine tourism.
“Certainly, the world has noticed that there is so much to love about the Philippines, for while we have only reached half of this year, we have already been able to accept over 2.62 million international visitors, very near our 2.65 million arrivals for 2022,” DOT Secretary Christina Garcia Frasco said in her speech during the campaign launch last June.
However, the new slogan has drawn criticism from various groups and social media users. Filipinos were quick to scrutinize the elements of the campaign, including the “foreign footage” used to produce the campaign video, for which its advertising producers “apologized” for the “highly inappropriate” usage, saying that no public funds were used to produce the video. According to the DOT, the “Love the Philippines” campaign was worth P49 million.
Over the course of the tourism campaign fiasco, lawmakers probed the controversial slogan, with others urging the tourism department to drop the campaign. But the DOT stood firm with its decision to keep the slogan.
Despite calls and adverse reactions, the tourism department still uses the campaign, while the tourism video with “foreign footage” has been taken down.
But what does the data have to say?
Methodology
Capstone-Intel Corporation conducted the study from July 1 to August 8, 2023, in order to assess the response distribution of users towards the fiasco. Through gathering all publicly available sources on Facebook, Capstone-Intel was able to analyze the response of social media users through over 414 posts.
Reaction distribution
The result shows that out of the 18,366 reactions on various posts on Facebook, about 7,394 users, or 40.3 percent, expressed a positive response to the tourism campaign, which, surprisingly, came only second because the most significant share of responses online, accounting for 9,057 users, or 49.3 percent of the total reactions, showed a “neutral” position towards the campaign.
Meanwhile, 7.5 percent, or 1,373 of the total reactions, are haha, while 253, or 1.4 percent, are wow reactions, and only 0.5 percent, or 205 angry reactions, were recorded, the data showed.
Upon analyzing the data, this suggests that the users, for the most part, provided responses that may be categorized as “neutral” in response to the controversial campaign slogan.
Top posts related to the ‘Love the Philippines’ campaign
The DOT’s Facebook post about their joint celebration of T’nalak, which was accompanied by a promotional post about Tagum, Davao del Norte, is the most engaging of all the stories related to the campaign, garnering a whopping 597.7 engagement score.
At the same time, regional tourism updates were posted for every region in the Philippines; the rest included news, editorials on tourism, casting votes, and promotional postings on Facebook, which also added to the number of engagements that were recorded for the campaign.
Top sources of information on the ‘Love the Philippines’ campaign
Capstone-Intel also revealed that the official page of DOT topped the list of sources visited by users in relation to the campaign, with a total fan count of 938,663 and an engagement score of 710.6 for its 24 posts. This was followed by regional sources, including the Department of Tourism – Soccsksargen Office with a reported 622.5 engagement score and 31,367 fan counts; the Tagum Tourism and Cultural Office came in next with a 575.2 engagement score and 34,975 fan counts; and the Sipalay City Tourism Office with a 430.5 engagement score and 22,697 fan counts.
