Pacific Magazine > Magazine > March 1, 2007

Cover Story

A Broader Vision

New Vision And New Direction For DFS And Guam Tourism

By Frank Whitman, Hagatna

Along with a number of Guam tourism officials, Jim Beighley, the new managing director for DFS MidPacific Division, is developing strategies to boost tourist arrival numbers and spending patterns. As the local head of the region’s largest retailer of luxury goods, he sees his efforts as complementary to those of hotel owners, tour operators and others in the visitor business.  

His current assignment is actually Beighley’s second in Guam. He first came to the island in 1992 and worked on the relocation of the DFS Galleria to its current site in the Tumon tourist district, helping develop “the vision that became Pleasure Island”—the hub of Tumon activity that includes the Galleria. In 1997 he left DFS to run Bluebell Guam, another luxury-goods retailer in Tumon. He left Guam in January 1999 to oversee Bluebell operations in Hong Kong, China and Southeast Asia.

Beighley returned to DFS in February 2003 to help “focus on the emerging Chinese market,” he says. His work centered around understanding the behavior patterns and motivations of the Chinese as travelers and as shoppers in order “to basically do with the emerging Chinese consumer the same thing they had done with the emerging Japanese consumer over a 15-year period from the late 1970s into the early 1990s.”

DFS Managing Director Jim Beighley is focused on visitors from Japan, China and Korea. PHOTO: Frank Whitman

Globally, DFS is focused on consumers from China, Japan and South Korea. In Beighley’s new Guam assignment, his task is somewhat unique in that Japan continues to supply about 72.2 percent of Guam’s visitors, Korea about 10.5 percent and political barriers allow only minimal travel from China. The strategy that worked with Japanese travelers a decade ago, no longer does.

“The biggest change that we’ve seen from the mid-90s to now is...that the accumulation of experiences in their life has become more important than the accumulation of things,” he says. Initially, DFS was built around the idea that “it was important for the Japanese to have this product and this brand of product and they would travel with that as a primary motivator to travel.”

In the past, travelers were typically taken to the stores
in buses as part of a tour. In the 21st Century, travelers most
often set their own itineraries and choose their travel experiences.

“Now they’ve got to want to come to the store,” Beighley says. “Our whole marketing, our positioning, the way that we lay out our stores and the way we interact in terms of customer service has to be about the Japanese consumer making an individual choice, rather than being put on a package tour and driven around.”

With the changing consumer in mind, DFS completed a $20 million renovation of the interior of the Tumon Galleria about a year ago and is currently in the midst of a massive renovation of its facade. The changes reflect the company’s decision to “occupy the luxury portion of the consumer’s choice,” he says. In the past, “because they were brought through the store, we could sell them everything that they could possibly need from a souvenir tee shirt to a $3,000 watch. But...because we as a brand need to evolve...we’re going to orient ourselves and specialize in this more focused, more narrow part of the market, the luxury side.”

The DFS efforts, however, will not be successful in a vacuum. Guam, as a destination needs to change in order to grow its share of the Japanese market—which has declined during the past seven years, Beighley says—and to “attract a different segment of customer that’s going to spend more when they’re on Guam on hotels, in restaurants, on optional tours and on retail. But in order to do that (Guam) needs to understand that every other destination in the world that attracts a large number of Japanese is trying to do the same thing.” The island needs to promote an experience for travelers that is unique and authentic. The Guam experience needs to expand beyond Tumon and should incorporate local foods and culture as well as natural beauty.

Beighley and DFS are optimistic—as indicated by the company’s Galleria investment—about the island’s tourist industry. “The industry leaders and the government leaders that I’ve talked to in Guam agree...that we do need to get a higher market share,” he says. “We need to go after a more affluent customer and we need to make the island more integrated into tourism. Everybody agrees on those things. It’s just a matter of putting together a road map and getting everybody behind it.”