Conrad Persons, president at Grey London, says distinctiveness is key in the competitive world of tourism
Winning attention has never been as important for tourism as it is right now.
Tourist boards have always had a difficult job. Countries battle to win the same customers at the same time of year, some with more iconic attractions than others. Plus, the playing field is uneven, with some markets spending disproportionately more than others. VisitBritain’s marketing budget is around £18m annually – the US spends nearly four times that amount promoting Orlando, Florida alone.
But the continued cost-of-living crisis is impacting the number of holidays people are willing to take. Over half of UK consumers plan to take fewer holidays this year.
This will reduce the available revenue pool and increase the competition, because instead of having multiple chances to lure travellers abroad each year, tourist boards may only have one. In this environment, distinctiveness will be essential.
Distinctiveness is what allows some destinations to stand out in the sea of sameness that we see in the travel industry.
And distinctiveness is also essential to levelling the playing field. It’s unlikely most markets will ever spend a fraction of what the US does. If you can’t outspend your competition, you have to find more innovative ways to grab attention and drive disproportionate growth.
Think earned first, paid second
The most effective route is an earned-first approach. Research shows that when brands focus on ideas that are likely to be shared organically on social platforms and picked up by the press, they can drive reach, consideration and fame that far exceeds the media they’ve paid for.
Findings from Les Binet and Peter Field’s The Long and the Short of It reflect this. Over a third (35%) of earned campaigns result in very large improvements in profit, versus 21% of paid campaigns.
Campaigns that excite people – that make them want to talk about them – are more effective. Period.
And if there’s one thing people love to talk about, it’s travel. So in this sector, earned media can be especially powerful. Take the launch of the Singapore Tourism Board’s brand platform ‘Passion Made Possible’, which helped break national records for UK and US visitor arrivals after generating positive media coverage worth S$63m in its first year.
But let’s be clear – an earned-first mindset doesn’t replace paid. It’s earned-first, not earned-only; traditional paid advertising is still an important part of the marketing mix. What earned media does is significantly boost the power of your paid work – so it needs to be a first thought, not an afterthought. The most effective campaigns deliver across both.
After all, if an idea is powerful enough to be covered by Conde Nast, viewed on TikTok, and shared on Instagram, it will almost always work in paid media. The opposite is not true.
In tourism, earned-first has another superpower: the ability to create urgency. Urgency is something tourism usually lacks; these countries aren’t going anywhere, so visiting them is easy to put off. Social is where WOM, recommendation, and positive peer pressure all converge to give travellers the urge to act now. It’s how destinations move from the bucket list to the shortlist.
From talk to action
So, how does an earned-first mindset work in practice?
First, you need an idea. Find a unique psychological insight from your target audience – a latent affection for your country, for example – and marry it with a unique cultural attribute of your market. What about your culture is distinctive and attractive to others, in such a way that they will want to talk about it?
Then, think about how you can create distinctiveness in the way you activate that idea. Not just through paid channels, but with earned-first activations that are participatory, designed to drive talkability, or that tap into a broader conversation. Have fun with it.
Thirdly, to scale ideas like those mentioned above, you need to rely on media across the full marketing funnel. It’s not all about TV; brands need to find their voice on social, in games, and on platforms, and use it to influence the cultural agenda.
The Swedish Tourism Association is the perfect example of a brand getting this right. Sweden is a small country, without the iconic tourist attractions and marketing budgets of other destinations. But what it lacks in landmarks, it makes up for in personality and culture.
So the tourist board worked with the Grey network to create the first ever phone number for an entire nation. Inquisitive callers were connected to a random Swede to learn about Swedish culture – even the Prime Minister got involved. The campaign resulted in 128,392 minutes of calls from people in 178 countries, plus 9.1 billion media impressions and 13 Cannes Lions awards.
It was an unconventional idea that prioritised shareability over paid reach, and ultimately, it paid off many times over.
In the age of social and digital platforms, attention can’t just be bought. It also has to be earned. In the competitive world of tourism, that’s truer than anywhere.