Which is your irresistible travel brand, your go-to escape partner that aligns so completely with your ideals not only for a holiday but your sense of self? Are you a Kuoni aficionado, at once adventurous and luxury loving? Or perhaps you’d opt for Eurocamp, wholesome and natural, maybe even Virgin Holidays for fun and friendliness. The fact is that competition in travel is fierce, and if you’re setting out to create a new travel brand it simply MUST be irresistible
Here are my 4 top tips
1) What is your distinctly different advantage?
When we work with new travel clients, we use our three step process ‘Discover-Design-Deliver’. It’s tempting to get straight into the fun stuff, the design, but it is imperative that you allocate sufficient resource to discovering absolutely everything there is to know about your potential market, target audience, competitors and conditions. In depth, thorough research and understanding is the cornerstone of any campaign and will enable you to discover, pinpoint and hone your distinctly different advantage. If you’re not different, you’re not noticeable.
2) It's all in the strategy
So to strategy, the roadmap for getting your brand to its destination. They say that strategy is the ultimate dark art of branding, and this is down to how misunderstood strategy is and how easily you can lose your way. Get it right, and you'll create successful design that gets results. But get it wrong and you'll end up heading in completely the wrong direction.
3) Become a story teller
We all love a good story, but to keep us reading we need to be hooked in the first few pages, patient types might even give it a whole chapter. But after that, if you haven’t captured their imagination, you’ve lost them. The same can be said when it comes to delivery, or selling your brand to the potential customer. The choice out there in travel is so vast that no-one will persevere with a brand that they find boring so think about your story and become adept at telling it.
4) Image is everything
The one thing that Kuoni, Virgin Holidays and Eurocamp have in common is a strong image and a unique personality. Chances are if we took away any identifying features like logos, a customer could still identify their most loved travel brand from the way that they communicate through both offline and online communications, even social. Ensure your communications align with your brand personality and above all, make them consistent. Inconsistencies are confusing to potential customers and they will quickly move on to a brand who has a tighter hold on their image.