Country slogans and tourism taglines – how can they say so very little and yet sometimes so much? I’ve posted my bemusement with these fascinating little one-liners that marketers use to ‘sell’ or position a destination before (after snapping 44 slogans at the 2009 World Travel Market).
This year, I decided it was time for an update. So here, after wandering the vast length and breadth of WTM 2012, are 105 slogans, 26 country logos (or fonts) and 7 regional taglines collected at the World Travel Market 2012. Slideshow above, text below. I’ve bolded up the ones I like. Enjoy! Continue reading →
After documenting 100+ tourism marketing slogans yesterday at World Travel Market (WTM) 2012, Bhutan’s is my pick of the bunch.
The catchphrase Gross National Happiness, or GNH, was apparently introduced by the King of Bhutan in the 1980s and it stands out as unique among the ‘wonders’ and ‘pearls’ of other positioning taglines. Perhaps it feels more authentic for its lack of marketing schmooze but it also still manages to tell us something: that this Himalayan kingdom takes its happiness seriously.
In fact, further research reveals Bhutan to be the only country to use GNH as both an economic measure, similar to GDP, and a guiding principle for its move towards modernisation.
It suggests a unique and fascinating place. But, yes, it also made me laugh – successfully upping GNH as it worked its sly slogan side-effects.
I’ll be posting the rest of the WTM 2012 country slogans… at some point soon.
This appears to have gone out on Sky 3, I’m not sure when, but is Pure Fried Comedy Gold.
Someone in my Twitterstream pointed it out a while ago but their video link seems to have been removed, so catch this one while you still can – it’s the only one I could find.
It features an amazing but quite scary cast of regulars of The Sportsman pub in Brum as they expound on their favourite pub subjects of cider, eating rabbits and lightbulbs, and falling off a bridge onto a railway and into the path of TWO trains.
You’ll have to watch it to get the visual punchline to the story.
Tourism slogan: “Visit Brum – if you think you’re hard enough.”
Seven years ago, in 2003, I watched a news item on Birmingham’s bid to become European City of Culture on the tellybox. I wasn’t surprised when we lost out to Liverpool after listening to a list of big arts organisations ‘to name but a few’. It was a weak presentation that was all ‘tell don’t show’.
And, to be honest, the new bid to become the first-ever UK City of Culture in 2013 seemed to be going the same way.
I don’t pretend to know much about these Council-led things, but I do know that the Council and mainstream media seemed to be saying the same old things as in 2003. For example, while I like and admire The Dhol Blasters, they’re surely not news in terms of the city’s cultural growth – and yet here they are, rolled again yet again for local TV’s limited idea of how to demonstrate Brum culture.
But then today Brummies spoke up in their hundreds via the Twitter hashtag #intheroom. They wrote about what it was that they loved about their city, their cultural pioneers, their ideas about culture and why ultimately Birmingham should win.
Roughly 1,000 Twitter messages were pulled in throughout the day on the Birmingham Newsroom’s blog – and the coup was that they were to be seen live by the judging panel in Liverpool between 2 and 4pm this afternoon. (Tomorrow the panel decides, winner to be announced next month.)
Some of the posts were funny, some poignant, some statistical, some just lists of great goings-on. At times, the sheer volume felt quite emotional. People were still posting Birmingham’s good points via #intheroom when I checked at 11.30pm – long after the panel had gone home to sleep on their decision.
So even if Brum doesn’t win, it was kind of a unifying experience in that it let those who joined in see what it was that others saw in their city. It made us feel invested in something that could easily be seen as a city marketing exercise. It put the voice of the people directly in front of the judges and, I think, finally managed a ‘show don’t tell’ that was possibly more powerful and moving than that of an official document of evidence (good as I’m sure it was) saying that ‘Birmingham is very, very cultural indeed, thankyou’.
Birmingham DOES have a lot going for it. Take it from me who left for 20 years down to #thatlondon but is hugely enjoying being back in the city because there is simply so much more to do these days – like seeing the Birmingham Royal Ballet perform tonight with IamPete, or wandering through a staircase in Moat Lane Car Park last week as ExCathedra choir members harmonised with the brutalist architecture until it sang back, or joining in a game of Market Pong after the fruit and veg traders have gone home.
The #intheroom display was impressive. And it seems to have been noted. Someone on Twitter reported: ‘Just had word through from the Culture team they’re #outtheroom and blown away by the response online’.
We’ll see soon enough how blown away they were, I guess. But it may be that if Birmingham does win the UK City of Culture 2013 title, that it might just have been the people of Birmingham who have swung it for themselves.
Posted onJanuary 30, 2010|Comments Off on Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 5: 101 romantic places around the world
Well, allegedly. Here, finally, is the source material that more than 100 PRs created via the TravMedia/Google Docs experiment. You can dip into it for reference or use it to create a whole new feature – just leave a link to your stuff in the comments so I can see it. (Also, scroll down for links to the rest of the series and the published articles):
Posted onJanuary 30, 2010|Comments Off on Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 4: the results of the Google Docs experiment
Time for a quick review. After being commissioned to write two ‘top tens’ for Allaboutyou.com, I posted a PR alert and Twitter callout to help me find ‘romantic places’ in the UK and abroad – more on the problem with top ten lists in part 1. In part 2, you can read the travel editor’s original commissioning briefs, and in part 3, the seven tools of feature research are listed. Now, in part 4, the story continues…
So what happened next?
There was my blank Google Q&A form sitting out there in a load of PR and tourist board inboxes. The idea was that it would act as a collection funnel for the incoming data – and keep it off my email.
Answer: Google Docs went nuts.
Research results 1-50
Over 48 hours, the online Q&A form filled up with 98 responses.
The CEO of the African Travel and Tourism Association (ATTA) – spotted the callout on TravMedia and reposted the request to 400 association members across Africa.
The PRs did all the hard work for me in preparing guide prices, product details, image sources and contact info.
Nearly every question was answered by each PR and boxes were filled in – although many wrote an essay where the simple location was asked for, which stuffed up the spreadsheet layout.
Reams of irrelevant material and spin were produced to make a generic place sound romantic rather than point out any actual romantic history, tradition or fact. Annoying although certainly not unexpected.
There were a small number of bang-on-target suggestions, which were siphoned off into a UK and a worldwide file as per the commissions.
Several places were suggested twice, eg the Taj Mahal. I ended up using both client details as I used information from both.
I DID receive emails – but only nine (annoying but better than 98!). Three PRs ignored my form and emailed text such as a ‘nestled castle in a perched village’ or entire Valentine press releases (all ignored). Another emailed for clarification – subtext: was it worth her filling in the form? Some PRs experienced firewall issues and couldn’t access the form due to Websense, which blocks personal storage sites. Another emailed after the deadline had passed. And one filled in the form with out of date information – oops!
My favourite justification for romantic credentials was this one: ‘My daughter was conceived there, so no better compliment to the romance of the ambience.’
Another PR threw in some language tips on what to say in Sardinia to your beloved: ‘Non posso vivere senza di te – I can’t live without you!’
Twitter feedback resulted in a few funnies but no major new ideas. It did have a supportive role when I had further queries, though – see part 3 for more on this.
On the whole, it was a spectacularly good response, though. What did I learn from it?
Some pros and cons…
There were issues: double postings, excessive writing, unfounded statements and opinions, clichés, spin and so on. (The original source material is to be published in the next and final post.)
But there was also great value in rooting out knowledge I wouldn’t have found otherwise, such as being able to wear a suit of armour to propose at Warwick Castle or the location of the original ‘Horse Whisperer’ ranch.
So I have to say to the PRs, a big thanks for taking the time to fill in the form rather than send generic press releases.
Some tips for PRs…
For those faced with a Google form or journalist request, DON’T waste your time spinning your product to fit the journalist’s angle. Facts, evidence, relevance and concision are the things that stand out over pretty prose and just stating that something fits the bill. It took seven hours to plough through all 98 responses, and to copy and paste the potentials. Take out all the generic suggestions spun for romance and this could be reduced to just an hour or two.
Ultimately, it was the chancing of so many sort-of relevant ideas that made the Google Docs/PR alert route financially unviable – shoving me frustratingly over time and therefore budget.
Factoring in picture research…
Sourcing good pictures is also like entering a time warp.
The pic research for each of the 10 blurbs was another tipping point. Free tourist board or PR pics are desirable and usually great quality. But traditionally writers haven’t had to source them – picture researchers have. Now, though, gallery features make popular editorial pieces and sourcing can be part of the commission package. Even with a media library log-in, or the PR contact for images, the resulting workload – the back and forth of emails, selection and zipping of images, collating and sending to the travel editor – soaked up another half day.
Surfing for images on a stock library is faster but you can still while away many minutes looking for the right image to go with your copy.
My judgment on the Google Docs research method…
Ordinarily, this type of feature would take me 1.5 days to write, but the extra spreadsheet and picture sourcing brought this up to 2-3 days. So using Web 2.0 tools did make life easier but it also actually slowed down the work.
The Google Docs sourcing experiment is not for every time – you have to be pretty dedicated to go through this process – and it’s probably not targeted enough for general themed features like these ones. It would probably work much better for my next list piece on great rail journeys.
But I do think it is invaluable when you are stuck for inspiration and it takes only a couple of minutes to put together. It also throws up some great source material and new ideas. The likes of TravMedia and HARO offer a community of experts and the wisdom of the crowd.
To round off, I’m finishing this series by publishing the source material itself (the locations and romantic USPs only in order to keep it manageable and to keep individual PR’s emails and phone numbers private).
Again I invite readers to compare the finished articles (UK and global) with the sourced material – would you have picked out the same list? I also invite the romantic among you to look for further inspiration and make your own selection from the list. Meanwhile, journalism students or wannabe travel writers are free to use the material to create their own travel feature from the material – – just leave a link to your stuff in the comments so I can see it.
Chris Guillebeau over at The Art of Non-Conformity blog says to think big – and that’s why he’s set himself the monumental and not inexpensive task to visit every country in the world by April 7, 2013 (122 out of 192 countries so far.) He reminds me of a crazy Swiss backpacker I met on my own travels whose concept was to hitchhike across every country in the world.
Then there was the lovely Twitchhiker who I interviewed earlier this year at SXSW in Austin. He’d decided to travel as far from his hometown in Newcastle upon Tyne as possible in 30 days (which turned out to be an island off New Zealand), relying only on the kindness and direction of Twitter users.
The trouble is, knowing my sticking power with New Year Resolutions, I don’t want to be massively ambitious here and fail before I’ve even started. But I would like to do >something<.
Looking through the #decadeinstats (tomorrow is New Year’s Day 2010), it seems not many people are marking their big moments in travel terms but in terms of hatches, matches, dispatches, number of degrees and hearts broken. (Click the pic to see a snapshot.)
So here are my unthought-out ideas so far – see what you think:
10 TRAVEL RESOLUTIONS FOR 2010
1. Hometown tourism
I love travelling to other countries but by its nature this is often superficial – suppressed by time, lack of local knowledge and trying to do too much (or little). Sometimes the best stuff happens on your doorstep so I think it’s time to write up the stuff that makes my city special and fun for others to visit. Birmingham: It’s Not Shit, for example, is a rather ace Birmingham blog. The author Jon Bounds has just finished one project (11-11-11) in which citizens board the 11 outer circle bus route for 11 hours on 11/11 each year. Next year he’s launching Dexy’s Midnight Run – a 5km run into town dressed as Dexy’s at midnight on June 21st.
2. Queen of the Bizarre
One of my travel editors once named me ‘Queen of the bizarre’ because of the less mainstream ideas I used to pitch to him. Maybe it’s time to return to that niche. Having recently come across the quirky calendar of eccentric English events for 2010, I’m tempted to either cover or perhaps even enter some of these. Think I’d be quite good at shin-kicking at Robert Dover’s Cotswold Olimpicks… It’s gonzo journalism and why not? If it’s good enough for Hunter S Thompson, it’s good enough for me.
3. More snow-shoeing
I really want to go show-shoeing! Someone please send me snow-shoeing! I did it in Slovenia for my 40th and it’s my favourite thing to have done outside of joining the opera this year. It’s great for the heart and aerobic fitness and it beats jogging round the block. How can I turn this into something a little more sexy though? Extreme show-shoeing? The New Year snow-shoe diet? Sponsored snow-shoe walk?
4. Transparent journalism
Journalists on press trips aggregate masses of information yet tend to generate only a few hundred words. I’m thinking ditch the polished prose (like there ever was polished prose) and blog what I’m going to pretentiously call the ‘vignettes of research’, from incidental little quotes and tips to insider trip photos that I collect along the way.
5. Blog my travel diaries
I have around 50 notebooks packed away in a trunk. I’m sure there’s some interesting highlights that can be edited out of there – with the power of hindsight etc. I also have some features that were commissioned and not published. I’m thinking I’ll publish them here under a creative commons licence. Hey, let’s play with copyright and see what happens.
6. Find the most boring holiday in the world
The problem with being a travel writer is that you can never switch off – there’s always something interesting to collect, note down, share, or someone to interview, or a new angle on a mass market place. My mission is to have a proper holiday in 2010 – and that means finding something/somewhere with zero write-up value. I suspect it’s impossible. Any ideas?
7. Career and holiday combined My trip to SXSW Interactive in 2009 was a double work whammy of writing up tech stories and also producing a feature on Austin itself. I learned so much there and it has given me a whole lot of context for working on all the digital projects that came through my agency in 2009. This year I’m looking for a Content Strategy Conference holiday destination – presumably somewhere in the States but I’m open to suggestions. That’s right, I want to go on holiday to a conference.
8. Take more video (and find a media trainer)
I’ve started to take and edit video – here are my fledging attempts at World Travel Market 2009 – but ideally I’m looking for someone to do a skills swap with me, ie, help me learn best practice for producing multi-media content (especially mini interviews) and I’ll help you with anything from web writing/editing and spelling/punctuation to beginner’s guitar lessons. Maybe I’ll write your headlines for you or something. I like writing headlines.
9. Guest bloggers Q&A
I do like a good Q&A – or is it just me that gets sucked in by those pages in magazines that asks (the rich and famous usually) what have they learnt, what mottos do they live by, have they ever said ‘I love you and not meant it’, how would they like to be remembered, type thing. Maybe something like this would be good for travel, local knowledge, etc.
10. The big idea
I’m buying myself time with this one, but in the next 12 months I’m looking for a big ongoing travel project that I can document into something substantial. It might be photographic, it might be ultra-budget or first-class luxury, it might be historical, or it might be eccentric. This is probably the resolution I’m most likely to break but the idea of a sabbatical of some kind is on the agenda. I have the time if not the energy.
That’s it for now and for 2009. I’d love to hear your feedback or suggestions. Until then happy new year for 2010.
Earlier I posted my bemusement about tourism taglines. There is probably some kind of data curve to measure the success of these. But after overdosing on one after the other at World Travel Market at London’s Excel recently, I have a few thoughts.
First of all, here’s the slideshow of WTM taglines: ‘Around the world in 44 marketing slogans’. UPDATE: I returned to WTM in November 2012 and collected 105 tourism slogans from around the world #WTM12 – though this post is probably a better read!
You can also see/download the individual pictures from my WTM Flickr set (non-commercial Creative Commons license).
If you can’t be bothered looking through the images, here’s the breakdown on the great and the good, the incomprehensible and the forgettable – the full list follows at the end.
The ‘no idea what that tourism slogan means’ section
Certain countries were adept at being vague as a means to sell their destination:
Anguilla Feeling is Believing
Florida Keys Come As You Are
Hungary A Love for Life
Taiwan Touch Your Heart
My favourite though was ‘Indonesia: Admit It You Love It’. Luckily I do love Indonesia and happily admit it, but what does this mean? I quite liked its ‘Unity in Diversity’ slogan a couple of years back – which sums up Indonesia’s 17,000 islands but perhaps doesn’t sound particularly attractive to a tourist. As the Jakarta Post reports, it doesn’t have a great track record in coming up with the marketing goods. In 2008 it was also ridiculed for getting its grammatical knickers in a twist with ‘Celebrating 100 Years of Nation’s Awakening’. Still, don’t let the terrible taglines put you off – Indonesia is an amazing country to visit.
One-word wonders
These countires tried to encapsulate their country in a single word – or in Malaysia’s case, a number (one, obviously!):
Brazil Sensational!
Incredible India
Cool Japan
WOW Philippines
Uniquely Singapore
Amazing Thailand
1 Malaysia
My personal favourite in this section is: ‘El Salvador Impressive!’
Double headers
With all the main superlatives gone, Italy and Germany both went for two-word slogans – neither particularly enticing, though affordable may successfully tap into the economic downturn affecting the travel industry:
Italy Much More
Germany Affordable Hospitality
Mother nature sells herself
The most successful slogans are often ones that evoke the place in some way. Countries blessed by mother nature seemed to have the easiest sell.
Montenegro Wild Beauty
New Zealand 100% Pure
Switzerland Get Natural
Belize Mother Nature’s Best Kept Secret
Come here!
Then there are the literal commands to visit – no inducement given:
Visit Florida
Discover Peru
Do these actually work? At least ‘discover’ hints at hidden depths, but ‘visit’, come on Florida, that’s just plain lazy.
Neighbouring factions
There seemed to be some competition between neighbouring countries also:
Albania A New Mediterranean
Croatia The Mediterranean As it Once Was
Namibia Land of Contrasts
Tanzania Land of Kilimanjaro Zanzibar and the Serengeti
Finding the pun within
Being a sub-editor, I respond to a good pun or wordplay – and successful slogans are often annoyingly memorable in this way. Personal favourites here included Jamaica’s mysterious rhyme of ‘Once You Go, You Know’. Know what exactly? I don’t know but I’m fairly sure it’s hot, happy and hedonistic.
And full marks to Slovenia, for finding the love within and being the only one to evoke Donna Summer’s disco classic in ‘I feel sLOVEnia’. Surely there are more here: for the smut factor, have a play with Aruba, Virginia and Malaysia.
Tips for a good tourism slogan
In light of the amount for knocking that tourist boards get for their marketing slogan attempts, if you’re a destination marketer, then maybe check out this How Stuff Works post on How ad slogans work before you shell out a fortune on rebranding.
The full list
Here’s the full list – of the slogans I managed to snap anyway (feel free to add more in the comments). And if it all gets too much to bear, I promise a very enticing tourism slogan awaits right at the bottom:
Albania A New Mediterranean
Anguilla Feeling is Believing
Aruba One Happy Island
Belize Mother Nature’s Best Kept Secret
Brazil Sensational!
California Find Yourself Here
Canada Keep Exploring
Croatia The Mediterranean As it Once Was
Ecuador Life at its Purest
Viva Cuba
Egypt Where It All Begins
El Salvador Impressive!
Visit Finland Breathe
Visit Florida
Florida Keys Come As You Are
France Rendez-Vouse En France
Germany Affordable Hospitality
Grenada Rhythms of Spice
Hong Kong Best Place Best Taste
Hungary A Love for Life
I heart New York
Incredible India
Indonesia Admit It You Love It
Italy Much More
Jamaica Once You Go, You Know
Cool Japan
See the world. Visit London
1 Malaysia
Maldives Sunny Side of Life
Montenegro Wild Beauty
Namibia Land of Contrasts
New Zealand 100% Pure
Romania Land of Choice
Discover Peru
WOW Philippines
Uniquely Singapore
Slovakia Little Big Country
Slovenia I Feel Love
Smile! You are in Spain
Switzerland Get Natural
Taiwan Touch Your Heart
Tanzania Land of Kilimanjaro Zanzibar and the Serengeti
Texas (visual representation of ‘Everything’s bigger in Texas’ – I think)
Amazing Thailand
And the funniest tourism-related ad slogan I came across in the course of this research? Here it is courtesy of St Johns Hotel in Solihull…
St Johns Hotel: sleep with us – you won’t regret it!
The three most successful tourism slogans of all time are, surprise surprise, all from the land of advertising glitz and shinola. According to Newsweek, they are: ‘I Love New York’, ‘Virginia Is for Lovers’ and Las Vegas’s ‘What Happens Here, Stays Here’.
But at the World Travel Market last month, the North America section of the vast London Excel trade show seemed subdued when it came to selling itself. Texas, for example, had ditched its ‘Everything is bigger in Texas’ for a visual representation of size via small blue jeans badge on a giant blank screen.
Texas: where everything is bigger
But perhaps North America was only quiet by contrast. Because elsewhere the tourism slogans and the excessive luxury of certain stalls were shouting their wares.
Take Egypt, for example. It was launching a brand new marketing tagline. ‘Egypt: Where It All Begins’ – in an off-the scale point size on a wall to the side of a small pyramid inside which the travel trade met to do business. (A few days later I spotted it on the side of a number 45 bus back in Birmingham – not quite so evocative.)
Egypt: where it all begins
What is interesting is whether such branding, on which tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent in an effort to relaunch a destination, works in a world where most tourism taglines seem to be ridiculed.
When Egypt was casting for a new slogan a couple of years ago, Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey suggested that, judging Egypt on safety, ‘Where it all ends’ might be a more appropriate line.
And then there is Panama’s ‘It will never leave you’ – which, as Jaunted notes, is ‘reminiscent of childhood trauma and STDs’.
While many destinations hope for the success of an ‘I heart New York’, many more create slogans that are instantly forgettable. I realised, for example, that I have no idea what my home city of Birmingham’s slogan is, or even the UK’s? So I sent out a request to teh Brum Twitter crowd – many answers came back but none definitive and no one mentioned The Word Is Out, which is what it seems to be. One too many council marketing revamps perhaps? And anyway can they even begin to compete with the marvellous, once-heard-never-forgotten Birmingham: It’s Not Shit?
[Aside: Funnily enough, Birmingham’s marketing department emailed me after my callout to suggest a quick interview so they could explain Birmingham’s tourism slogan to me. A game of email tag followed in which I still couldn’t get the answer to what the slogan actually is! I mean why on earth does a city’s slogan need explaining? Isn’t that the point of a one-liner – to sum it all up? Anyway…]
So while tourism slogans mostly fail to resonate with their target audience, they do offer a chance for a city, region or country to go shopping for a new image and dress itself up in new clothes every so often (even if they do risk turning out to be the emperor’s new clothes).
I do wonder, though, whether we need this kind of traditional marketing anymore in a world where destinations are mapped so thoroughly on the internet. Who is fooled by a sales slogan when you can dial up authentic pictures, video, social networking, reviews, blog posts, newspaper sections, FCO advice, even local people and travel companies, pretty much for any place and any experience.
Whatever your take on sloganising a place with a one liner, WTM did offer an unrivalled opportunity to document as many of these destination taglines as possible – at least, until the security guard chucked me out.
I manage to snap 44 of them, but there were still 100-plus more countries, states and regions that I missed or had left their marketing slogans at home.
You’ll find the full set of pics are gathered into a set on my Flickr and a slideshow, full list and breakdown in a separate post: Around the world in 44 tourism slogans – because unlike taglines, I can’t keep the word count down. Which, is perhaps both their advantage and their Achilles’ Heel.
Tourist Vs Traveller 