A portrait of Frédéric Cornet, new member of the Research & Statistics group
Dear friends,
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It was with great pleasure that I joined the R&S knowledge group during the last meeting in Zagreb.
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My path here has not been a standard one: one year ago, tourism was a hobby and not my job at all! A trained economist, when I joined Nielsen back in 1995 I quickly turned to market research. Nielsen, among other things, collects purchase data at supermarkets and provides market share information to retailers and consumer products companies. There, I had the opportunity to experience different professional lives, from IT to Operations and from Quality Management to Marketing. With this background, I was lucky enough to start at VisitBrussels in February 2012 as Manager of R&D and discovered a totally different world. It was different on two levels:
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- In retail and consumer products, market research is a fact, virtually everything is measured and research vocabulary is shared and understood by everyone. In tourism, non-R&S people have had much less exposure to these ideas and are not familiar with technical terms and jargon.
- In tourism, it’s actually very difficult to deduct results (arrivals, bednights) from actions as so many factors come into play. With drinks, for instance, you can predict sales of water, cola or beer just by looking at a temperature forecast – it’s a far more linear relationship than in tourism.
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From my 9-10 months on the job, these differences make it very interesting.
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My work has also allowed me to rediscover Brussels, my city but also the capital of 500 million Europeans. It’s like an haute couture garment: tailor-made in a fine material to make you feel good in it.
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There is no ‘best time’ to visit Brussels because there’s always something happening here: cultural, festive, sporting, culinary and much more.
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In town for just a few hours or a few days? No problem: there are different levels on which to experience Brussels, each with some brilliant surprises in store.
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As a first step, discovering our heritage: the shapes and colours of the gilded gables on the Grand-Place; Art Nouveau arabesques; the comic strip walls; the rounded forms of Manneken-Pis and the Atomium…
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To go further: the creators in fashion and design; our celebrities such as Tintin and the Smurfs; music, dance and opera; delicious pralines and thousands of beers; great cooks and brilliant painters.
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As the next stage: exploring our very special art de vivre, consisting of the following ingredients: a good helping of creativity that’s catching, just enough surrealism for an offbeat view of life, unlimited multilingualism and sociability, all seasoned with a dash of "zwanze", our very local kind of humour and gentle mockery.
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I definitely love living here and offer you this good advice: plan your next citybreak in Brussels!
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Frédéric Cornet
VisitBrussels
F.Cornet@visitbrussels.be
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