I travel half a million miles a year through the northern and southern hemispheres. I've lived on four continents. I have homes in three. My wife owns a travel agency. So I'm constantly and consciously filtering travel and tourism experiences, and the marketing propositions that go alongside them.

Ireland is one of my favourite places in the world because of the lyricism and spirit of the people, past and present.

My home is New Zealand, another island nation that is going through, like you have some decades ago, its own journey to be independent in its spirit and identity.

Both countries have tourism centre stage as a driver of economic growth. A multi-billion dollar industry that spins benefits into many parts of the fabric of commerce and community.
    

Today I want to challenge many of the practices and assumptions about how you brand a country and market tourism, and I want to lay in front of you some ideas and examples about how I've gone about constructing my perfect country brand. Here is my first challenge, this is how we do it in my country.

My next challenge is to propose to you that most tourism marketing campaigns are swimming in sameness. You see here a beautiful snow-clad set of mountains. It could be the Southern Alps in New Zealand, a range east of Las Vegas, or near the ski slopes of Gaastd. Exactly the sort of image you see in dozens of tourism marketing campaigns.

It just so happens (picture in full, showing armed troops) that these mountains are in northern Afghanistan. Not exactly the sort of place you're going to flock to for some winter R 'n R.

My point is that scenery is a commodity. Scenery is exactly what most tourism marketers flog to prospective travellers. "Our mountains are better than your mountains" is what they seem to be saying. "Our swimming pools are more relaxing than yours." "Our golf courses are more spectacular than yours."

And so it goes on. Most country branding and tourism marketing campaigns are inter-changeable for another. Aruba for Acapulco for the Antigua. Bermuda for Bahamas for Belize. Cancun for Costa del Sol. And so on through the alphabet.
    

But simply looking for return on investment is to short-circuit the premium. I'm motivated by return on involvement. I'm focused on emotional premiums. How you create lifetime enchantment, not the one night stand that so often goes with the tourism trade? Been there, where next? How do you create experiences that offer a lifetime of value? How do you turn a college kid on a backpacking holiday into a business investor in your region or country when they're running a big merchant bank 20 years later?

In short, how do you create your country as a Lovemark? Five years ago I asked my people at Saatchi & Saatchi "what comes after brands?" I had observed that brands were becoming commoditised. Sameness was becoming pervasive. Great performance was a table-stake. Exceptional service was an everyday expectation. Distribution was ubiquitous.

Instinctively I knew that the emotional dimensions of a brand offered the greatest opportunity to create a state I call "loyalty beyond reason". Where do you find the sweet spot that attracts and draws people back again and again to what you are making and selling? How do you arrive at a state where people simply say "I love you"? Because this is where the premium territory lies.

At Saatchi & Saatchi we call this a Lovemark. From Trademarks to Brands to Lovemarks. We've developed and workshopped and tested this thinking for five years now. It has resulted in world-changing creative work from our network, a book just about to be published called "Lovemarks: the Future Beyond Brands" and an iron-clad research methodology that can quantify the emotional characteristics of a brand on this Love/Respect Axis, that is the basis of our Lovemarks work.

Great marketers don't need research. There's another challenge for you. You have to operate from your heart and your gut. Then research is useful for verification and fine-tuning. Look at this Love/Respect Axis and I bet every one of you can place the Irish tourism experience - or that of your local student pub - instinctively on this grid.

A personal challenge of mine is to help my home country New Zealand to become a Lovemark. To assist its journey from the ambivalent center of this grid to the high respect, high love quadrant.
    

Ireland implicitly has Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy in DNA, although you wouldn't exactly known this when you arrive at Tourism Ireland's website and are immediately offered a dozen options for - golf. I want lunch with Van Morrison - now that would be mysterious!

Saatchi & Saatchi had a short and inglorious relationship with the New Zealand Tourism Board about seven years ago to define a global positioning for New Zealand. We developed what we believed to be an outstanding proposition for New Zealand.

We loved our idea so much, it felt so right to us, that my co-creator Brian Sweeney and I have, in a private capacity, developed it into a pirate brand for the country, a rogue marketing campaign that is designed as much for the people at home as it is for our Diaspora as it is for tourists as it is for investors.

I am deadly serious about saying that the best tourism marketing programs don't just flog adrenalin or serenity or whichever body position the relaxation mavens want to induce, but intelligently position and leverage the full potential of the nation to benefit from the visitor encounter.

We always start with Mystery, and there are five elements, the first being Metaphor. A big problem with marketing today is too much information. A great picture might be worth a thousand words, but the right metaphor can launch a million emotions.

We had two key insights in the search for the perfect metaphor for New Zealand. First, we simply looked at the map to see where we are. It usually helps to be there in the first place (show several maps of the world without NZ being on it, then show it present). You could extract a metaphor by just looking at this map - and no, "bottom" is not a metaphor!

Next we turned to biology, today's most important science because of the explanations and insights biology offers for the evolution and emergence of new phenomena that can aid our world. Through biology one understands how networks operate, how systems evolve, how trends rise and fall. You can best understand how the Internet works by describing it in a biological context, how you get such rapid viral growth and sometimes destruction. The rise and fall and rise of the dotcoms was a necessary biological event.

In biology, the edge is the most important place, it is where change occurs, where new life forces emerge to infiltrate the center. In biology, change happens on the margins. The action is not at the center, but on the fringe.
    

Edge certainly felt to be the right metaphor to apply to our extraordinary natural beauty, our adventure-driven outdoor pursuits, our world-leading scientific innovation, our brooding literature and art. Edge of the earth, cutting edge, leading edge, competitive edge, edge of your seats, edge of danger. Edge had the visceral emotional element of a brand we could identify with, travel the world with, invite people home with.

Edge explains everything I need to know and feel and tell about New Zealand. When I say "come to the edge" to a potential visitor to New Zealand, how can they resist.

I've spent some time on the metaphor element of New Zealand as a Lovemark. Getting the metaphor right was overwhelmingly job #1. Everything flowed from this. What is your metaphor for Ireland? Heaven? That has pretty universal appeal. 

I'm only being half serious. What I do say is that for your country, your region, your town, your business, you need to invoke the power of metaphor in order to unleash emotional responses to what you do. Only by doing this will you have consumers who are 'loyal beyond reason'.
   

I understand the story behind the flag of Ireland - the green, the orange and the white representing the peace between the two. But as a symbol it's just another flag among a sea of vertical and horizontal stripes. When I see the Shamrock, immediately a thousand memories and wishes and feelings and senses are unlocked.

The architecture of New Zealand's symbolism is antiquated and confused. Who can pick our flag, our national brand, from this mosaic? 

There's a big campaign happening in New Zealand right now to install the Silver Fern as our national flag. The symbol of a thousand great sporting victories - and one famous defeat here at Munster in 1978. An emotionally resonant symbol that is a shortcut to the heart of a New Zealander wherever he or she may be on the globe. 

Further elements of Mystery that go to build the brand of a tourism destination are Great Stories, and bringing together Past, Present and Future. It's my contention that the people of a country are more compelling than any landscape or sunset or lonely castle or golf course or pool recliner you can put up. Ireland, being the home of saints and scholars, has a head start over most countries when it comes to weaving great stories. A website I went to listed 1,741 Irish saints! What a starting place for great stories!

In New Zealand our everyday heroes are rugby players…and more rugby players. Much as I could die happy with this love of the game, I knew it did not contribute to the culturally rich and diverse story we had to tell as a country-from-the-edge.

So we put on our story-telling hats, created a website nzedge.com, and went to work on producing and often unearthing the stories of heroic New Zealanders who have helped change the world in some way. Our stories from the past inform our present and inspire our future. We tell of our Nobel Prize winners; our mathematicians and cosmologists and rocket scientists; our great explorers and adventurers; our novelists and painters; our divas and DJs, screenwriters and stars. Everyday New Zealanders.

These people are really what the edge story is all about. There's a saying that New Zealand punches above its weight. It's like we're a bantamweight taking on the heavyweight championship of the world…and winning.

Go look at the Peter Jackson story on nzedge.com. Peter and the Lord of the Rings team are edge theory personified. His effort is the biggest and the boldest and the best story about taking on the world and winning, but there are hundreds of other examples and inspirations.

Lord of the Rings shows the scenic splendor of New Zealand that is opening up a whole new wave of tourism - among edge-seekers. But more profoundly, the Rings enterprise shows a design and technology capability unmatched in the world, it shows off a business moxie that we were not previously known for, and it shows off a spirit that marks out New Zealanders as being among the best people in the world to work and play with.
   

First, taste. What more can I say than "the good, the great and the Guinness". Undoubtedly a Lovemark. An Irish taste sensation that works for you in every country of the world.

About a third of a tourist's spend is on food and beverage, so elevating the taste sensation is a smart place to go.

New Zealand has undergone a taste revolution in the last 25 years that has brought an avalanche of wine and food writers to our doorsteps. Turns out that New Zealand is a perfect climate for growing grapes and making wine. Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir especially. New World wine that has given the country a veneer of sophistication that in turn has elevated our food offerings. The New Zealand rack of lamb is an iconic export. Now our chefs are conjuring our cuisine in ways you never thought were possible.

Famous New Zealand chef Peter Gordon has just opened a hot new restaurant, Public, in the NoLita area of Manhattan. Does this tempt you: "Pan-fried New Zealand snapper on a truffle, vanilla and celeriac puree with braised radicchio, green beans and piquillo pepper salsa." Said the New York Times, "This is a high-risk, high-reward dining proposition. They did not come thousands of miles to bore New York. Understatement is not in the plan. Sometimes you have to slap people in the face to get their attention."

The second Sensuality dimension I want to emphasize is sound. Music is the soundtrack of our lives. Music is important to us because it can set moods and trigger powerful emotions. Ireland is so rich with music and yet I don't hear it when the word "tourism" is mentioned. You have unique traditional music - music even from the Bronze Age! And compelling contemporary music. I mean, is U2 the greatest of what?! Van the Man; the Coors; Sinead O'Connor; the Cranberries; Enya. Make me dream of Ireland!

The New Zealand sound is still emergent. Where I sense it is heading is young, urban and brown. Maori is one of the most dynamic indigenous cultures in the world. Auckland is the largest Polynesian city in the world. This new music which we're featuring on nzedge.com is saturated with urban goodness. It is sweet, not bitter. It places us firmly in the South Pacific, not South Central. It's digital, interactive and dynamic. The toys and tools that kids have available today enable them to actively play with, challenge, contribute to, and extend the notion of our South Pacific identity.

Intimacy is the third leg of the Love triangle. Intimacy has three very different faces: Empathy, so that we can understand and respond to other people's emotions; Commitment, which proves that we are in the relationship for the long haul; and Passion, that bright spark that keeps the relationship alive.

I'm not going to dive into Intimacy today. Mystery has been the main focus. I do want to say one thing about Intimacy, and that is that tourism isn't simply a bums-on-seats-five-day-package-tours-of-decrepit-
castles-and-18-holes-of-golf affair.

Tourism is an emotional business. There is only one way to understand other people's emotions, and that is by listening. When to you hear the most astonishing insights? When you create an emotionally powerful space for them to settle into. What is said is often not so important. It is the inflections, the pauses, the combination of sounds and body language.
This creates a complex mix of sounds and signals that builds an empathetic, long-lasting relationship.

Marketers find this very hard to accept. Their disciplines are founded on rational analysis and conclusions, not idle chat and unfinished sentences. In their goal to push as much information as possible, marketers fail consistently to make real connections. Intimacy is an understanding of what we are sharing in this moment, not just what is being communicated.
   

COPYRIGHT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
NZEDGE.COM IP HOLDINGS LIMITED 1998-2005.

View from the Edge | Gateway to America | Tommorrow is Overdue 
Love for the Family Abroad | Islands at the Center and Edge | Principals  
Every World Needs an Edge | The Design of Cultural Identity | The NZ Edge  
Edge of Knowledge | Global Edge | Golden Weather | Nothing is Impossible 
Vision for New Zealand | Inspiration | Risk, Risk Anything | Tourism

Home | Blog | About | Top 10 | Heroes | Features | Gallery | Media | New 
Contact | Updates | Links | Mailbox | Speeches | Shop