Marketing Our Brand
Building on the Success of Our Creative Marketing Campaign
Newfoundland and Labrador’s ‘Find Yourself Here’ campaign has been hugely successful in positioning the province as a unique and exotic destination. The campaign has won many regional, national, and international marketing awards, and has earned the distinction of being one of the most unique destination marketing campaigns in the country.
In 2007, our marketing campaign won the Tourism Industry Association of Canada’s (TIAC) Marketing Campaign of the Year Award, an award that recognizes our creativity and commitment to excellence in marketing. It also led to the Marketer of the Year Award at the Atlantic Canadian ICE awards, an advertising awards competition that honours innovation, creativity, and enterprise. And, Newfoundland and Labrador was also named a ‘Top 30’ travel destination for 2008 by Lonely Planet, one of the world’s most respected travel guidebook publishers.
This heightened level of interest in our destination and our marketing efforts is a result of our national award-winning marketing campaign, our increased efforts to showcase our province to the international travel media, and the fact that our industry is providing travel experiences that are in high demand.
The campaign has a clear target market – sophisticated travellers looking for a natural and exotic experience ‘off the beaten path’. A visit here is a chance to meet our people, to interact with our dramatic and remarkable landscape, and to experience the creativity of our culture first-hand. The ad campaign showcases who we really are – a natural, yet surprisingly, exotic destination that goes beyond the packaged, ‘plastic’ kind of tourism other destinations offer. It is the combination of our people, our culture, and our dramatically rugged landscape that gives Newfoundland and Labrador its unique position as a tourist destination.
We need to build on this success and convert interest into increased visitation. To achieve this, we must first strive for a further understanding of travellers’ needs and wants, and their destination decision-making criteria.
As an industry, we must have the courage to challenge conventional wisdom to ensure we are meeting market needs, and are open to new, innovative and non-traditional forms of marketing. We must focus our resources on the target audiences and markets that offer the best opportunity for a high return-on-investment.
Tourism operators have a lot to offer travellers, but on an individual level it can be challenging to generate adequate exposure. The answer lies in forming cooperative marketing partnerships to build stronger, coordinated campaigns using the combined resources of the province and the industry. Leveraging our collective time and resources to market the destination will result in increased spending, tax dollars, jobs, and investment throughout the province.
Equipping our tourism industry and individual operators with the necessary brand tools and marketing support will help reinforce the brand at all levels of visitor engagement, and translate into a consistent experience that meets visitor expectations.
Delivering a consistent brand message and experience at all levels of the tourism sector will help differentiate Newfoundland and Labrador from competing tourism destinations. And it will increase our recognition among our key target audiences looking for an antidote to the predictable and the plastic.
