Tower Bridge, London

Tower Bridge is the quintessential London landmark and a visitor attraction receiving over 800,000 visitors annually to exhibitions within its towers, views from the walkway between them and the engine rooms beneath the bridge. As part of City Bridge Foundation, the organisation was developing its strategic vision, including exploring existing and potential audiences and embedding audiences thinking throughout the organisation.

In a focussed piece of consultancy, I analysed audience data derived from self-completion touch screen surveys, booking records, education visits, mystery shoppers, social media dashboards and open-source data from local and national government. This included crunching through large volumes of spreadsheet data and make recommendations for further research to inform strategic developments in the long term.

A key challenge was finding audience segmentations that could enable different parts of the organisation to make decisions and take actions to satisfy existing visitors while reaching new audiences. An extremely diverse national and international tourist audience is commercially very important, but so is an educational audience across the UK and also very local and disadvantaged audiences which continue to be an important focus as the strategic vision develops.

I presented conclusions from my analysis alongside a detailed costed way forward including specific data collection, long term analysis and embedding audience thinking across the organisation.