Your messages are the articulation of your brand values. For the Rough. Real. Remote. campaign, we chose videos to interpret our brand for the world.

Based on our experience, we found four key things to keep in mind when defining messaging:

- Be Consistent
- Be Different from your competitors
- Be Synergistic with your partners
- Reflect Your Branding Position

The messaging needs to be uniform, so that the message is clearly received. Before you create your brand messaging, be sure to understand the messages of your stakeholders, partners and competitors.  You want to work with your partners and stakeholders and stand apart from your competition.

As a destination in Greenland, we didn’t want our messaging to contradict the national brand messaging – we needed it to work synergistically – yet we wanted to stand apart from other destinations in Greenland.  Our point of differentiation was our focus on the quality and diversity of regional adventure travel products and values.

The messaging obviously needs to reflect the brand position. Our goal was, and continues to be, for people to think of “Rough. Real. Remote.” when they think of Destination Arctic Circle, just as they would think of “romance” when they think of Paris or “modern” when they think of Tokyo. We know we are still a long way off from this type of brand recognition, but consistent and effective messaging is the only way to get there over time.

As we brought our brand to life and defined the messages that would help us reach our long-term goals, we found that we were actually shifting the tourism narrative away from outdated cultural traditions, such as igloos and drum dancing, that are often showcased solely for touristic entertainment.

The shift that the brand values brought about was and continues to be towards authentic, living Greenlandic culture while we continue to produce messaging that contemporizes and contextualizes our place for the adventure tourists.

Our key message is: Modern Greenlandic culture is alive and evolving in Destination Arctic Circle.

One example of how we conveyed this message was to show how the Rough Riders pushing the limits of snowmobiling in the backcountry of Sisimiut were creating new Greenlandic cultural traditions. And another narrative was the story of a 17 year old high school student and a 70 year old hunter both passionate about dog sledding. While other stories focused on sharing Arctic street culture, with kids playing soccer in the snow, doing bike tricks in town, and snowboarding.

So, in our project our messages were part of the development of a new narrative, but we still stuck to the ground rules: Keeping the narrative in tune with the new national Pioneering Nation brand, keeping it different from the messages being put out by neighboring destinations, and keeping it consistent and true to our brand.