Marketing our destinations goes far beyond communicating to your potential visitors that you have hotels, things for them to do, and food for them to eat. Alongside the rise of the “experience economy,” future guests are now looking for you to sell them on an experience. For example, in Visit California’s new ‘What If, California’ campaign emphases an “elevated California image, reinforcing those truths about the California Dream” and sees their marketing campaigns as critical to “shaping perceptions of the state of California” rather than promoting individual activities or locations. As destination marketers, this is exciting yet also can be more challenging than marketing a specific service or good. With the aim of creating a brand that is focused on emphasizing experiences and resonating with your target audience, we sat down with Verdin Creative Director, Megan Condict, to get her advice on cultivating an irresistible brand that captivates to-be visitors by showcasing the personality of your destination.
Candice Walton: Thank you so much for joining me today, Megan. To start off, could you share why we’re focusing on building a brand personality rather than solely focusing on individual marketing strategies?
Megan Condict: Yes, the place we need to start is by opening our minds to showing things about our destination that aren’t directly connected to “heads in beds.” Hotels are found everywhere. Hotels themselves aren’t why people travel. We have to show potential visitors what they can do here. In California, you can do most activities in a destination almost anywhere else within California; You can go shopping, kayaking, hiking, surfing, etc. In our Central Coast region, who would choose Arroyo Grande and who would choose Atascadero? They both have hiking, restaurants and lakes. They have the same things on paper, but they’re drastically different feelings. This is why we push to get personality– we want to show what it feels like to be there. To use a really extreme example, when you think of New York City, that has a personality! People go to New York knowing the personality they’re getting into and that’s what they want.
CW: Where would you start when it comes to curating the personality of a brand?
MC: We start with finding the differentiating factor in the personality. We try to come up with a voice that expresses the main idea for the place. This tone becomes a destination’s personality litmus test. That’s what we’ve been working on with Atascadero and Arroyo Grande because they are similar on paper but not in reality. Atascadero for example, “Simply Genuine” drives everything we do. If it’s fussy or snooty – that’s not Atascadero. Arroyo Grande is “Craft Meets Class.” You’re going to have amazing food, there’s a real level of quality that yet it’s not pretentious. Arroyo Grande’s personality is like a really good friend inviting you into town.
CW: Do you start with identifying your target audience and designing a brand for them? Or do you start with refining your identity as a brand, and then creating marketing materials out of that place?
MC: A destination is a destination. They are who they are. They’re a living, breathing place, not a company. So whatever the brand personality is, it has to be absolutely true to them. What we go out and find is who wants to go and enjoy that, and then we market the brand to them.
CW: Are there any exercises you like to do with destinations to help them find their “secret sauce” that will later inform your marketing strategy?
MC: Familiarization tours, or “Fam tours,” are really important. For example, by having a fam tour in Atascadero– it was really just like, “woah”–it opened our eyes to what’s going on in the town and the history. So I think it’s so incredibly important.
We also do a branding exercise with our clients that is modeled after a brand deck survey. A lot of times if you ask an organization “How do you want people to feel?” and it’s usually the same words any other place might say: welcoming, kind, etc. To move past that and dig deeper, we have words that are pitted against each other so this forces them to come up with new ways of describing themselves. It might say “we are timeless or we are progressing.” There’s a place for everyone and no answer is wrong– we want to help find the most genuine answer for each destination to create an authentic personality.
CW: What is one example of a brand you helped design, and how did that translate into both a marketing strategy, and then a piece of marketing collateral?
MC: With Visit Atascadero, we’ve had them as clients since 2015 or 2016. They’ve been doing a lot of work to build out the experience for the visitor. I used to be a resident there, I have friends who have businesses there. We internally noticed there’s a concentration of young entrepreneurs that are making things, physically making things, in Atascadero, in a huge amount, in a way that’s kind of striking. That totally goes along with their personality! They do things exactly how they want and they always have. It’s in their history, in the blood of Atascadero, in their lineage. This is what’s true to them– doing things the way they think they should be done. That means creating new businesses when we have a talent to share. So what we did was we paid attention to them, we noticed a trend, and we seized the opportunity to bring that into their collateral. Through many meetings and brainstorming sessions, we came up with “All In” and came up with that independent, American, “do things my own way,” “I have this idea and we are not going to worry about what others are doing.”
Usually our branding process looks like taking a long list of experiences and what we did here was flip that process on its head. We asked, “What are the people in Atascadero doing?” Rather than just “What can I do here?” And the people in the town are making really incredible Italian Salami, they are making and roasting coffee beans every day, creating spaces for art to thrive, they are crafting beaver wool into custom hats. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on and we reverse engineered showing you what you can do by showing you what’s going on in the town. By letting the residents and business owners share in that destination-personality spot, the visitor is really going to understand what they’re getting themselves into.
CW: Do you have any tips on infusing your destination’s marketing efforts with personality?
MC: Once you have brand guidelines, and there might be a campaign guideline depending on what you’re up to, I would encourage you to look at the tone, or have your marketing agency come up with a tone-guide that shows you where the boundaries of your voice are. One of the bigger ways that personality comes through in social media is through tone of voice. It’s almost like speaking in different accents. In Arroyo Grande, if the tone is like a friend, you might say “come on over.” Lean into that tone, don’t be afraid to sound like a human. A lot of people are scared to have personality in their writing on social media and it comes out like a bunch of companies wrote it. For visuals, sharing photos that tourists or locals took so it’s not in a marketing-eye but it’s in the eye of an actual experience. That will just “up” your personality naturally.
CW: This is all so great, Megan. Thank you again for taking the time today!
MC: Of course! I love getting to talk about this.
Megan has so many different launch points for your brand to start or further your journey in your destination’s brand personality, there is a step here anyone can utilize. Whether a fam tour, branding exercises, or new ways of intentionally integrating the brand experience into your social media platform, there are strategies for every touchpoint between your brand and audience, building a distinctive impression of your brand’s experience for your audience. With a more distinct brand, this culminates in more visitors for your location. Megan’s focus on intentionally seeking out the authenticity of your destination, sets us up to create a distinctive brand with it’s own unique tone, voice, and feel, exciting potential visitors and helping them dream for what experience they can have.
Want more information or to work with us? Contact Mary at [email protected] for a free consultation for your destination’s marketing potential.
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