Our goal in launching this project was to bring our newly and lovingly created brandto life for the world. As we went into content creation, we were able to recite our brand values in our sleep.  At that stage, however, they were simply words or sentences which described emotions we felt acted as the best higher order benefits tourists would receive from visiting our place. But what did that mean on film?Know Your Brand Values
Understanding brand values in context, means defining your values with words, images and a story.We literally had our brand values (Rough. Real. Remote.) written on a white board, in order to constantly remind ourselves what we were trying to convey, because it was so easy to get lost.

Know the Context
Secondly, we had to constantly remind ourselves of the context itself – promotional tourism videos.  Although we hoped to inspire pride in locals, and have them reflected in what we created, they weren’t the primary audience – adventure travelers were.

(By Adventure Travelers, we were aiming for well traveled, outdoorsy, 25-45 year olds, higher than average education, higher than average household incomes, equally male or female, unlikely to have children).

The key for having consistent messaging was simply keeping the context and the brand values constantly top of mind. Also, we didn’t drill the values into the heads of our protagonists (Arne Hardenberg and Stefan Gimpl) – because conveying the emotions came naturally to them.

Know the Goals
Defining your goals is the most logical place to start. But in tourism, especially as a destination marketing organization, its not always straightforward – because the goal is promotion not sales, so the goals are a bit more fluffy (and is called stuff like “increase awareness”).

Our key goal, as a small destination in an unknown country, was to improve awareness of our place with the limited resources we had. But other goals we think you can achieve through this type of social media campaign might be access to a new market (say you want to reach Brazillian outbound tourists), changing the focus of your brand, or launching a new product.

Whatever it is, narrowing in on the goals will help guide you down the right road: “Raise awareness of our destination among adventure travelers in the US through social media,” would be an example of that, but so would be “Increase sales of biking itinerary in Northern Italy.”

Bring it All Together
Your final project will ultimately be the product of your brand values, your context for bringing them to life, and the goals of doing that.

Keeping those three broad components top of mind as you move through the details will ensure that you stay on course, on message, and on track to reach your ultimate goals.

So for us, bringing it all together meant conveying the feelings and emotions of Rough. Real. Remote. through promotional tourism videos that would be released and shared over social media in order to raise awareness about our destination