Enventure Research is pleased to be working again with Marketing Birmingham to conduct research to evaluate the economic impact of Birmingham’s Christmas markets and events programme. Marketing Birmingham is the area’s strategic marketing partnership and operates the leisure and business tourism programmes, Visit Birmingham and Meet Birmingham, promoting Birmingham and its wider area, including the Black Country and Solihull.
Each year, Birmingham city centre hosts the largest German Christmas market outside Germany and Austria, offering visitors a wide selection of food, drinks, gifts and live music. Known as the Frankfurt Christmas Market, it attracts a huge number of visitors, recorded at 5.5 million in 2014. This year marks both Birmingham’s 16th Frankfurt Christmas Market and the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Frankfurt-Birmingham Partnership Agreement, which began a period of collaboration between both cities. A number of events have been planned to celebrate this occasion, most notably this year’s Christmas market, which this year for the first time will run over the whole Christmas period until 29th December.
The research will take the form of a survey of visitors to Birmingham’s Christmas Market in order to understand the economic impact of the market and events programme. The survey will explore reasons for visiting, awareness of Christmas markets and events, length, frequency and time of visits, mode of travel, level of spend, visitor satisfaction, information sources used to plan visits, preferred communication channels and demographic information. The questionnaire will be designed in such a way that the results are comparable with previous years’ surveys in order to track attitudes and perceptions over time.
Trained, locally-based market research interviewers will administer the survey to a random sample of 900 visitors face-to-face. The team will work a variety of shifts at agreed sampling points to ensure that a range of day time, evening and night time visitors can participate, including both weekends and weekdays, term-time and school holidays.
Upon completion of the fieldwork Enventure Research will analyse the results and produce an independent interpretive report which includes clear and practical conclusions and recommendations for Marketing Birmingham. The results of this evaluation will be used to analyse year-on-year trends and help to inform future funding, investment priorities and marketing and communication strategies.