Destination Branding

There’s no place like you. How to capitalize on your local character.

In marketing your destination, there is one powerful factor that is often overlooked: your destination’s inherent character and completely unique identity. How do you find the elements that define complex destinations? Often communities in the West promote attributes like the weather, mountains, and livelihoods. This type of approach is like seeking individuality by sporting tattoos, piercings, and leather. If so many others also possess and promote these same attributes, then how can destinations stand apart from one another and attract visitors to their community?

Focus on your Character!

The Marana Heritage Project engaged stakeholders from all parts of the community. Focusing first on the community’s character, we constructed an authentic identity and discovered new products. Counter-intuitively, we did not focus customers or competition.

Part of the problem is that branding from its inception to today, largely takes on the consumer perspective.  In this class, we will balance the traditional consumer-based branding approach with a place-based branding approach that uncovers and leverages your community’s deeper, more original identity. We will show you how to develop a brand and positioning strategy from the very heart, soul, and character of the destination. Identifying your destination’s core values and brand pillars is great, but represents only a fraction of the deeply defining elements that can unify, energize, and activate your destination. Participants will learn how to engage more stakeholders and identify the qualities that separate your destination from any other. In our class we will shed light on how to align the destination’s cultural identity with its brand identity. We will provide the basic components of these two complementary methods:

  • A place-based approach that reveals what people of the destination share in common, their cultural and natural character, heritage, and lifestyle based on living in the destination
  • A visitor-based approach that reveals what people to the destination say and think about the destination based on  past experience to the destination and paid advertising impressions

We will present success stories of tourism research, collaboration, product development, and promotion from  different communities. This class will include activities that prepare participants to implement ideas immediately. At the conclusion of the class, participants will receive a destination branding tool kit. In this class, participants will learn specific techniques to:

  • Evoke greater confidence, unity and purpose within the destination
  • Identify new assets, products and opportunities for the destination
  • Develop richly textured creative content for the destination brand
  • Cultivate deeper visitor connections and business relationships

Dust off your welcome mat and get the ruby reds ready for the community collaboration and media attention that could follow.