By THEA RUTHERFORD, FN Features Editor

thea@nasguard.com

NEW YORK - The candy blue and cottony white beaches of The Bahamas are glimmering in the most unexpected places in the U.S.

American consumers, who form the basis of The Bahamas' core tourism market, are doing anything from flipping magazine pages, to pumping gas, to picking up newspapers and popping M&Ms, when suddenly they find themselves gazing at beckoning photos of a sandy paradise awash in the golden smile of an endless sun, just hours or minutes away from home.

The Bahamas' offerings haven't changed. The sea, sun and sand sparkle brilliantly as they patiently await the country's visitors; but the Ministry of Tourism and its Public Relations firm, Weber Shandwick, have pole-vaulted over the traditional, in new ways by which they seek to sell these natural goodies to an ever-expanding market.

The Ministry has clutched the hands of new marketing partners with mighty billboards in the U.S. and has sprinted off into the sunset of new opportunities for the country. As such partnerships, with entities whose products reach millions, like M&Ms, Family Fun, Woman's World magazines, Exxon Mobile and Coke, the theatre company- Cinemark and the Conde Nast Traveler, swell, and multi-media promotions flood newspapers, radio stations and supermarket circulars around the United States, the Ministry holds its breath for more and more visitors to stream into The Bahamas.

The Ministry's latest coup, by partnering with Disney, has been aligning the country exclusively with the films Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3â forming ensuing partnerships with products and local hotels that sell the islands of the Bahamas as a destination filled with pirate lore and adventure.

And it's all real. Over 300 hundred years ago buccaneers really did swagger across Bahamian shores, leaving behind legends of buried treasure in their wake. Tagging along with what is expected to be one of the hottest movies of the summer, starring the likes of Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, the Ministry has reclaimed the piratesâ legitimate connection to The Bahamas. Even though the movie itself is set in no particular island and portions of it were also filmed in St. Vincent and Dominica.

Forming so many promotional partnerships with so many consumer giants was a sleight of hand that the Ministry and it's PR firm pulled off with deftness and without exchanging so much as a dollar with the companies.

"The real secret of success is that no money exchanged hands here," said Rene Mack, Weber Shandwick's president of Travel and Lifestyle, during a press briefing held in New York City last Wednesday. "These promotions were not paid for. What the Ministry did, and did very successfully, was create its own currency, the currency of travel."

Mack credited the Ministry for a feat that could only have worked because of the country's solid reputation for delivering on its promises as a destination.

"It's the reputation of The Bahamas and the fact that it delivers year after year that enables the destination to constantly up the ante and to pull off bigger initiatives, to be more innovative, to be a bit more daring," he said.

How'd they do it? Seeking to mine the possibilities of innovative marketing, the Ministry of Tourism invited Disney to hold its national partners conference in Grand Bahama last year. The conference lowered the draw bridge to a tsunami of marketing partnership opportunities for the destination.

"No other destination had the intuition, the street smarts, the curiosity to work with other major brands and with Disney to take this beyond," said Mack.

Delicious photos of the islands and partnering hotels such as Pelican Bay, Old Bahama Bay and the Sheraton Grand Bahama Island, now fill promotional ads in conjunction with the film and particular products, luring consumers to the country. Hotels on islands such as Abaco and Cat Island have also joined in marketing promotions through the Ministry's radio partnerships.

Tourism Director-General, Vernice Walkine, noted that the successful partnership of the Ministry with the private sector hotels in the country bears witness to the trust that such partners have in the entity and the strong relationship between the private and the public sector.

Diversity is King. This wave of innovative marketing and all out exposure comes at a time when the country's global destination competitors are tightening their gloves for more intensive bouts of eye-catching marketing punches to expand their consumer base.

"If we want to stand out we need to push the envelope," said Walkine. "We're competing not just with the Caribbean but the world, including the Middle East."

As options for the average vacationer broadens, The Bahamas is challenged to shine amidst the clutter of the market. The Ministry's efforts to court and connect with major partners in short and long range projects nudges The Bahamas into the every day life and lexicon of consumers in its tourism pool, evolving tourism and the average Bahamian.

At the same time, the Ministry encourages the average Bahamian to snatch the opportunities that increased exposure and ensuing investments will bring to the islands and make them work for him. In January, it formed a Business Development, Planning and Investments division to ensure that the incoming investments were what was needed in each particular island and that the people of the islands saw the investments as opportunities for them to become owners within their economies.

"It is not enough to be employees," said Deputy Director of Tourism, David Johnson, who also heads this division. "We need to be owners," Walkine finished.

Bahamians, she said, should take advantage of these opportunities to create ways to support their families, themselves and their communities.

The changing nature of the tourism product, whereby more and more consumers want to utilize Îmixed use developmentsâ that make residences out of some portions of hotel properties, opens the door to more opportunities, Johnson expressed.

Seven out of every ten rooms are now built as residences rather than hotel rooms, he explained. Visitors who invest in the country in this way become more than just transient tourists on three-day vacations, but repeat visitors with a stake in the country who will tap into other local markets as they create a home away from home in the islands. These are the visitors who may buy local art to decorate their homes, said Johnson.

While the vacation home industry grows, Johnson also said that the Ministry would use planning to ensure that housing would not become out of the reach of Bahamians, in an environment where labour export occurs in between islands.

Sustaining the industry The Ministry's recent partnerships and accomplishments are geared towards fortifying the country's global reputation as a satisfying destination.

Platinum partnerships and coveted stamps of approval from mega sellers like Sports Illustrated, which has a circulation of 62 million. The magazine used the country for photo shoots two years in a row, landing The Bahamas on its covers for both years and prominently featuring models on its beaches on 40 pages, increasing exposure for the country in bales.

A new brand alliance with sports retailing giant Orvis, will thrust the Islands of the Bahamas into more homes and before the eyes of more potential visitors through mention in its catalogue that circulates among 12 million readers and initiatives like national retail promotions in the opening of its new stores. This initiative will include anything from the presence of Junkanoo groups to Bahamian chefs, Bahamianising store openings, expressed a Weber Shandwick representative.

The company is also working with the Ministry to create a guide certification programme for local bonefishermen that will result in their listing on its travel website.

The Ministry and Weber Shandwick have also organized a number of press trips over the last few months that allowed journalists from newspapers and magazines in key markets around the U.S. to experience The Bahamas. The results have meant prominent articles on the country in the pages of periodicals such as The Boston Herald, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and others.

Events like the annual Weather Conference that convened for the tenth time this year, also help sustain the industry by inviting meteorologists to the country to become more educated on the region and its geography and to improve hurricane forecast and coverage.

Seen as an almost suicidal mission initially, the weather conference has become something that the Director General said she is proud of. Talking about a subject like hurricanes that is often taboo to vacation destinations, actually gives the country a level of transparency, Mack expressed. It also helps meteorologists to predict more accurately where hurricanes will strike, preserving the tourism industry by properly informing potential visitors on weather conditions. A hurricane assaulting one part of the region, may not necessarily make another destination unsafe to visit.

Over 100 meteorologists participated in this year's conference while another 200 watched through vodcast, a combination of audio and visual that can be downloaded onto a PC, MP3 player or Ipod, creating over 100,000 hits for the conference's site. The conference was also broadcast around the U.S. on media outlets such as MSNBC, the Weather Channel and NBC's weekend TODAY show, among others.

Individual destinations Walkine stated that promoting each individual island as a viable destination within itself was the next step for the Ministry.

"Marketing is important to the objective of causing the industry to be able to sustain itself and the key to that really is to create a reputation for The Bahamas and an image of The Bahamas thatâs a quality series of destinations," said Walkine.

While the Director General noted that the multiple island make-up of the country with its number of destinations was an interesting marketing challenge, she said that each island deserved the opportunity to reach its potential.

"It will take a while to get there," she said. "But, in order for these islands to be able to sustain themselves we have to create an enormous buzz in the market place and begin to communicate all of these islands."

More to come. The tourism officials said that there were moreexciting partnerships in the works for the country that they could not divulge at the time but would elaborate on in the future.