Brand USA Takes Aim At Canada

Brand USA intends to take a new look at Canada.

That’s the promise from CEO Chris Thompson, who concedes that his strained organization may have taken its number one market for granted, deploying resources and programs elsewhere, reports Press Today’s Mike Dunbar in this week’s digital edition of Canadian Travel Press.

Now that Brand USA is over its formative stage and has received a renewed mandate from Washington until 2020, Thompson said the public-private partnership is free to plan for the mid and long term.

And he pledged that Canada would be firmly in focus, saying. “It’s time to sit back and look at Canada again. We need to ask ourselves if we’re adequately deployed in our prime market.”

Speaking at IPW in Orlando, Thompson said, “However we might have been perceived in terms of deployment comes down to the fact that we’ve been in the process of development. In some ways this is still a start-up organization.”

He pointed out that the current management team has only been in place for three years and added, “If we’ve come up short, it’s been a question of band-width. Given our resources we could only be pulled in so many directions and the craziness of shaping the model took more resources than we ever anticipated.”

For the full story, check out this week’s digital edition of Canadian Travel Press by clicking here.