In today's Times, Herman Grech focuses on the chorus of disapproval for the Malta Brand campaign and talks to the experts about the MTA's unpopular marketing initiative. One of the campaign critics Winston Zahra tells him that "the message has been pitched at too high a level and is being missed by many people":

"Concurrently, people who do understand it have found it patronising and, quite frankly, I think this has resulted due to the fact that the MTA is trying to persuade people to take responsibility where the authority has failed miserably in what it promised to deliver itself." Moreover, the timing of the campaign, being launched in the middle of a poor period for the tourism industry, has led some people to look at it as a simple PR exercise, Mr Zahra said.

In yesterdays's Times, the same Winston Zahra who is both a hotelier and a governemnt advisor told Steve Mallia that the Brand Malta campaign "has been torn apart locally":

That message is necessary and correct but the way it's being transmitted is too complicated and goes over the heads of too many of the people that need to understand it. The other problem we have is our sales and marketing effort which has been very ineffective over the past 18 months.

Even the MTA's brand consultant Christian Sinding, the brains behind the Brand Malta campaign, acknowledges the harsh criticism and "admits that the local campaign can be fine-tuned":

"We might have used language which wasn't accessible to everybody. In hindsight, it might have been a better idea to talk about the core values," Mr Sinding, who steered several successful branding initiatives overseas, said.

Any guesses who brought Christian Sinding to Malta? Well, according to this interview in The Business Times last March, it was ironically Winston Zahra himself who recommended him as a way of "supporting" the former MTA chairman, Romwald Lungaro-Mifsud:

When Romwald was appointed I told him I did not agree with his appointment and the rest of the team on the restructuring committee did not agree with his appointment. But I also told Romwald he had my full support. I did support him and even put the MTA in touch with Christian Sinding.

A cynic might suggest that Christian Sinding helped Lungaro-Mifsud "accomplish his mission". Commenting on the "resignation" of the MTA chairman, the editor of The Malta Independent on Sunday Noel Grima was not very kind in his assessment:

One of the “missions” that was “accomplished”, other than the advertising spend on CNN seen in countries, many of which have no direct connection to Malta, was the famous and expensive Brand Malta exercise, which has become a national laughing stock and has not served one whit to make Malta any better for incoming tourists. Once again, the failure of this exercise shows the faults that have bedevilled MTA and its predecessor NTOM: high spend on consumer advertising, little follow-up and even less, achieving results at ground level. It is a measure of the desperation at the top, a tourism entrepreneur told this newspaper: in times of trouble, the last card to play is to get everyone on the bridge, so that all are accountable and none are responsible.

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