You are invited to help build Potential on Investment (POI) 2.0 as destinations begin to answer the question: “What is the financial value of social media and digital activity on earned media channels?” What is POI? POI is a formula that destination marketers can use to measure the potential financial impact of a DMO’s social […]
DMO Value Proposition
What the destination has to offer and how to share the success it delivers
Place DNA™ airs resident viewpoints to aid tourism planning in Big Sky, Montana
Can you define your destination’s community identity? Do you know your residents’ greatest hopes and fears about tourism, and do they impact your planning? There can be no destination branding without residents. To build lasting credibility and authenticity, a destination needs to work outward from its identity. This means identifying and articulating the core of […]
Fight your DMO’s identity crisis with Place DNA™
Who do you think you are and why does it matter? In the contemporary destination marketing landscape, the best destination marketing organizations (DMOs) not only have a solid understanding of their destination’s identity but know how this foundation intricately shapes the value they offer. Misalignment can lead to the wrong expectations from visitors and residents […]
Boutique destinations are making a massive impact
In 2015, the Skift travel magazine declared “The Rise of the Boutique Destination” as a trend to watch. This mirrors the message put forth by urban expert Richard Florida, author of “The Rise of the Creative Class”. Florida has predicted the rise of the distinctive city and the people that support its identity, saying, “How […]
Does your brand lack impact? Consider commercial partners
The stories of your destination are the essence of its promotion. Visitors, residents, stakeholders, and your organization shape visitor perception through word of mouth. Collectively, these stories form a key component of your destination’s brand. Commercial brands are also a powerful source of stories about a place. Brands that clearly originate from a place, or […]
How do your residents feel about tourism? Visit Flanders studies local perceptions of carrying capacity
Visit Flanders is taking resident opinions about tourism seriously. The Belgian destination management organization (DMO) has released a report written by Vincent Nijs that describes resident perspectives about carrying capacity and the perceived value of tourism in the city of Bruges. Nijs conducted this study as part of his MBA thesis at MODUL University in […]
Are DMO visitor centres making a Blockbuster mistake?
“I’ve been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix […] Netflix doesn’t really have or do anything that we can’t or don’t already do ourselves.” -Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes, in a 2008 interview with CBS News In the mid-2000s, Blockbuster Video was the world leader in movie rentals. The famous blue and yellow stores […]
Building stable funding models and revenue streams: Webinar highlights and recording
When it comes to funding, what’s the bottom line? For many destinations, diversification will help lower the risk of losing a single source of revenue. As part of our destination marketing webinar series, Destination Think!’s Senior Strategic Consultant Aaron Nissen presented research into today’s spectrum of funding models and shared some of the insights from […]
Meet your visitors’ needs and avoid marketing myopia
In 1960, Theodore Levitt coined the term “marketing myopia” in Harvard Business Review as a cautionary description of a common marketing mistake. Levitt’s concept claims that companies are short-sighted when they view marketing as merely a tool for selling specific products, rather than meeting the needs of their customers. The video below gives a short synopsis […]
What is Place DNA™? Here’s your essential reading list
Destination marketers need to understand the different types of value that a place can offer. This understanding starts with clearly defining a place’s intrinsic character, also known as Place DNA™. DMOs that build their branding on a true community identity will be able to improve the experience and the value they bring to their stakeholders. […]
Destinations: Beware the better mousetrap fallacy
“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” This quote attributed to the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson illustrates a common misconception in business. The “better mousetrap fallacy” is the mistaken belief that a superior product will automatically generate customers, which would remove the need for building that “path […]
Don’t drown in the sea of sameness: A destination branding paradox
Destination marketers tend to believe that good branding is about standing out in the crowd. This is understandable, as traditional marketing training encourages new marketers to create unique, compelling messaging that simply must be heard due to its creativity and emotional resonance. This creates a problem and a classic branding paradox: If everyone tries to […]
3 essential elements of the place brand formula
How does the rest of the world see your destination? Shift perceptions in your favour by defining and communicating your authentic place brand that flows outward from your destination’s DNA. The outer layer of place branding has three essential elements that can help your destination become known for the right reasons. These elements are so […]
Learn about Seville’s vision to collaborate with residents, rebrand and join the top tourism cities in Europe
Welcome to Seville, where the streets are full of life, cultural wonders, and an increasing number of visitors. The city now seeks new ways to manage its destination. How can Seville manage tourism growth in a healthy way to avoid the overcrowding of Barcelona and other cities like it? The new path forward for Seville […]
Need better visitor stories? Improve your place product
“How was your trip?” The answers to this question are the stories your destination’s visitors and residents tell. Travel has infinite variety, but the resulting stories all have one thing in common: memorable experiences. This means that if your destination marketing organization (DMO) really wants to grow awareness and visitation by telling the right stories […]
Don’t build your destination’s brand through advertising
Andrew Hardeman of the media and marketing site Mumbrella advises that marketers “need to focus more on improving the customer experience rather than emotional storytelling at scale, […] because – despite what we may think – most consumers don’t care about having an emotional connection to brands.” A strong destination brand isn’t built through advertising […]
Visit Victoria’s UK foreign office leads innovation in working with trade partners
As destination marketing organizations (DMOs), their international offices and their trade partners work together to promote their experiences and services, strong collaboration is essential to ensure that all stakeholders’ needs are met. Through digital-first marketing, the London, UK office of Visit Victoria (which changes its name from Tourism Victoria as of July 1, 2016) has […]
Use Place DNA™ to define your destination’s core identity
Place DNA™ is at the core of the three layers of place branding that help destination marketers understand how residents, visitors and potential visitors perceive a place. By articulating the intrinsic character of your destination, Place DNA™ provides an authenticity test for all marketing activities that follow. Identifying the elements of Place DNA™ will help […]
Destination Cleveland: Shifting perceptions and mobilizing locals
How does a destination battle negative perceptions? Get creative and embrace your DNA. “We’re not Paris, we’re not New York, we certainly aren’t Amsterdam,” said Corinne Allie, Senior Interactive Media Manager at Destination Cleveland in talk during Destination Think!’s Social Media Tourism Symposium conference in Amsterdam. Instead of fighting against what people were saying, her team […]
Why destination marketers need to understand Place DNA™
What is the DNA of a place and why is it important? Why is a destination’s DNA relevant to place making, place marketing and destination marketing? Defining Place DNA™ Simply stated, a destination’s Place DNA™ is the definition of its intrinsic character, the meaning that people ascribe to it, or more often, a mixture of […]
Four critical trends impacting destination marketing leadership in 2016: Part 2
Cost and Revenue: New ideas imply new business models. Can we apply creativity to rethink the way we produce revenue? There is enormous disruption affecting the destination marketing industry. Over the past six months, the Destination Think! team has invested a significant amount of time conducting research on these challenges. Through an extensive series of […]
How destinations can demonstrate value by using Blue Ocean Strategy
Now that you’ve learned why place marketers should use Blue Ocean Strategy, how can destinations put this into practice and demonstrate value? As the last article explored, most business leaders understand the two common business strategies framed by economist Michael Porter, which demand a choice between creating a high-value product and striving for low-cost implementation. […]
Why place marketers should use Blue Ocean Strategy to improve their value proposition
A successful strategy for place marketers needs to focus on value innovation. Blue Ocean Strategy offers a way to do this, and could be an eye-opening concept for those seeking to differentiate their destinations effectively. Most strategists will agree that marketing and business are all about making hard choices. People often think in terms of […]
Round table discussion: Responses to Harvard Business Review’s “Branding in the Age of Social Media”
What is a destination’s brand and how do you define it? Destination Think!’s Senior Strategic Consultants recently had a lively discussion about this topic in response to an article by Douglas Holt in the Harvard Business Review: “Branding in the Age of Social Media.” One key claim of the article is: “Companies need to shift […]
Why place branding needs to be built from the inside
There can be no city branding without citizens and no destination branding without residents. From afar, city and destination branding often looks like Italian lasagna. As district, city, province, region, country and private partner brands combine, their messages stack on top of one another in messy layers. When the layers don’t blend well, it can […]