Interview with Kern Cowan, Chief Executive Officer, Tobago Festivals Commission

24 Feb Interview with Kern Cowan, Chief Executive Officer, Tobago Festivals Commission

The Tobago Festivals Commission oversees numerous festival events. Can you please introduce the commission to our readers and explain how your diary is balanced between the different events occurring across the island?

Our mandate is to work with organizations on the island to provide managerial support and strategic direction for the events. We do both national events as well as local Tobago events. We also partnered with two other companies under the division of tourism, which is the Tobago Performing Arts Company as well as the Tobago Tourism Authority Ltd, which is charged with promotion and tourism management.

In terms of how we balance what we do, we have a very excellent team. We try to project a lot of what we need to do in advance. So, we are already planning for the national Carnival in March. We try to at least have a three to six months window of pure planning before there is actual execution, building the themes, etc. We try to ensure that the team is not overburdened. We divide the work amongst the team ensuring that each event and each festival gets the oversight and the quality that it requires, because we believe in brand quality and we believe that every aspect of the brand quality must connect to the expression of destination Tobago and how that is seen on the international scale.

The promotion continues. It is important for us to express ourselves, not only to ourselves, but to the market that we’re trying to reach. The North American and the UK market are markets that we are targeting, as an island. It’s important for us to position our festivals so that they can know what they’re coming to be a part of.

But not just the festivals. The festival gets you here, but when you arrive, the experience is phenomenal. You get to experience Pigeon Point, the Argyle Waterfalls and all that Tobago has to offer just by being here for any one of our festivals.

Tobago is becoming a destination in its own right stepping out of Trinidad’s shadow. What are the key successes that you have delivered through this transformation, making sure that the culture takes part?

The Tobago culture and the Tobago heritage itself is very unique and it causes us to be very pride oriented. We love what we do and who we are, who we came from. We have a unique dance, linguistics, unique qualities to ourselves that we leverage as a festival commission and try to showcase those things, because that is what really sets us apart from anything else. Our carnival wouldn’t look like Trinidad’s, our Heritage Festival wouldn’t look like another Heritage Festival, because of our homogeneous nature. We have unique pieces of ourselves that we try to express on and push in the forefront and that is where people like the Tobago Performing Arts Company play their part in terms of expressing those things.

Our intention is to ensure that we support the orange economy as best as we can, because we believe that the orange economy is the way forward in a non-oil sector, it is one of the sectors that really has a lot of potential to bring exponential international and direct investment. Once we can really develop our orange economy, it forms a new income for the entire island and breaks us into new markets.

What would you say are your selling points in terms of festivals? What are the differentiations that you would make?

Our food is one of our major things. Our food sells. Our food is one of our unique natures. Our dance is also very unique. We have the Ole Time Wedding that is part of our Heritage Festival and that in itself is its own unique thing. Then, of course, you have the goat and crab races. You will have to see that to understand what that means. Those are the things within our sphere that really sets us apart as a unique economy.

The most important thing that we’re going to engage in going into 2025 is early promotion, wider promotions on a worldwide scale and a more targeted approach to our marketing in terms of dealing with our source markets that we can develop numbers and earlier bookings and more commitments from our tourists and those that we are targeting in a general state. Of course, Miami is a major hub for a lot of other cities and countries generally. Being open to that gives us a lot more latitude to bring people into the space. It kind of dovetails into a greater experience altogether.

Tobago has produced its fair share of celebrities, such as Winston Duke. How can Tobago better promote itself so that it is known around the world for its famous sons and daughters of the soil and what would you like to see in the future?

Investing in long-term partnerships with our diaspora is a long-standing conversation that we soon intend to put into practice. We have seen how proud our fellow Tobagonians are and we know that involving them in our outreach activities will be beneficial to all parties involved. We expect great things from these partnerships, as we continue to find or build the next Winston Duke and others. It’s a multi-pronged approach that allows us to develop more out of the orange economy and push them to the world scale so that Tobago can be seen more. When you hear Barbados, you immediately think of Rihanna and we want to have our own examples like that.

You are brand new in your role, having been announced just over a month now. What is your vision for the future of the Tobago Festivals Commission? And how are you going to treat this?

One of our visions as a commission is to be internationally recognized as a mecca of festivals in the Caribbean with a year-round of authentic Tobago cultural experience. It shouldn’t feel like anything else but Tobagonian, but at the highest quality. In achieving that, it is important for us to buckle down to what is our expectation, what do we want to achieve as a people and how we plan to get to that space.

We take into consideration all our festivals individually and what we are doing now is ripping it apart to see where we can improve and how we can make it more attractive on an international, regional and even local scale, so that we can see our numbers and our appreciation for what we do very differently. It’s all about impressing a new outlook going forward.

What would be your final message to the readers of the Miami Herald?

To your readers, I want to tell them, come see it yourself. Tobago has a lot to offer. My words can really do so much, but your eyes and your experience can do a whole lot more. Tobago can give experiences in life like no other. But I guarantee you, once you come once, you’re going to be back again.