We travel the world to find the beautiful, but if we don’t take it with us, we will lose it along the way. This week, Brand USA unveiled its new creative campaign, “America The Beautiful”. It’s a bold, exciting messaging strategy designed to keep the USA at the forefront of travellers’ consideration at a time of increasing headwinds.
Despite the obstacles of funding cuts, personnel changes and travel bans, Brand USA has elected to go ‘all in’ on inspirational creative execution to overcome adversity. It’s a gutsy move, but hopefully an inspiring one to destination marketers up and down the land. When did we trade inspiration for transactions, forgetting that the heart of progress is found in the spark, not the sale?
But aside from the noise around its existence, a reason the Brand USA unveiling also felt exciting was its overtly stirring message, clearly part of a wider brand-building exercise. It’s designed to appeal directly to that inspiration stage of the travel purchase cycle and focus on that specific piece.
Good destination marketers know that they are playing in that very particular, but important part of a travel consumer’s journey. Therefore inspirational, story-based creative should be a key part of any destination’s strategy. You’re not just looking to convert the traveller now; you’re building up a relationship for their next travel experience in the mid to near future.
Capturing attention in the Inspiration stage has arguably become more important than ever before as travel search and booking behaviour has evolved. Terminology may vary but historically “Inspiration”, “Planning”, “Booking” and “Sharing” were all recognised as particular steps in a purchase cycle one had to move travellers through. Different marketing channels do different jobs in that process. Mass communication media like TV, out of home, digital display and online video would take care of the inspiration stage, before letting their friends in paid social, search and retargeting look after getting the conversion over the line.
This all felt fine, as long as the consumer was making one trip purchase at a time.
But is this really still true now? Do consumers box off their trip planning like this? Not really. The current travel consumer is often planning multiple trips over a year at any given point. A city break here, a family holiday there, maybe a couple of upcoming business trips… A recent Google study claimed that 74% of users continue to research trips after completing a booking. Great for daydreaming consumers. Harder for destination marketers.
In recent years attribution tools designed to help destination marketers have become more widespread. Destinations can now get insight to help them better understand the material effect on visitor numbers, as well as understanding visitor movement better. But just utilising these tools to mark all stages of the purchase journey as pass or fail isn’t always going to allow stories to be told and travellers to be inspired.
If a destination is now essentially in a situation whereby it’s perpetually having to build its brand and relationship with consumers, then its creative message needs to have room to breathe. To inspire. To move. Of course it should be measured, but in the right way using the right tools to understand the creative’s influence on visitor sentiment, brand lift and website engagement.
Brand USA is doubling down on creative storytelling in an environment where they’re under more scrutiny than most. Let’s take confidence in that and allow destinations to highlight the beautiful and carry on inspiring the wanderlust in all of us.
