DAEJEON, KOREA — Small and Medium Business Administration (SMBA) and the Agency for Traditional Market Administration decided to foster 100 specialized markets where domestic and foreign tourists can shop and tour until 2015 by finding and developing the unique characteristics of markets in relation with local history, culture, and resources for tourism. They plan to first select sixteen markets and provide USD 9.9 million this year.
From this year, in order to develop the unique characteristics of markets, they plan to expand the scope of support to ‘cultural tourism markets’, ‘international tourist attraction markets’ and ‘5-day folk markets’ and provide up to USD 822,000 per market for two years.
In addition, based on the results from the previous support, SMBA plans to push forward various projects to foster markets so as to have national brands and continue to develop.
First, SMBA will establish a 5-year business plan for each market to strengthen its developmental capacity. It will operate an education program for merchants throughout the year to motivate and encourage their participation in market specialization and its various projects, and SMBA will foster and support social corporations for the markets to have a stable source of income and increase their self-sustaining abilities.
Second, for diverse PR and marketing to raise the effectiveness of projects, SMBA will increase the number of institutions participating in the ‘One institution, one market’ sisterhood and create an environment for them to become real partners, and it will pursue comprehensive promotion through the diversification of SNS marketing (creating homepages, Smartphone environment, etc.) to young customers.
Third, to increase a synergy effect from coordination with other related institutions, SMBA will build a disaster and crime prevention and broadcast system in order to prevent fire and theft in coordination with the ‘U-based Public Service Promotion Project’ of the Ministry of Public Administration and Security, and it will push forward a cooperative project with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to develop culture and tourism content that can show the unique characteristics of a market.
SMBA and the Agency for Traditional Market Administration will hold an information session on the selection of markets and institutions that will participate in the 2012 specialized market project in Daejeon on January 27.
