A storied destination

Editor’s note: Anna Lilleengen is client consultant at Nunwood Consulting, a U.K.-based research firm.

The proliferation of low-cost air carriers and the expansion of their pan-European route network means European consumers now have a greater choice of vacation destinations than ever before. Consequently, the need for established tourist destinations to market themselves appropriately, and communicate their unique “reasons to visit” clearly and effectively to their target audience, has become requisite.

As tourist destinations face up to increased competition for market share, VisitScotland, Scotland ’s national tourism agency, approached U.K.-based Nunwood Consulting in 2003, to develop and instigate a qualitative research program, the first of its kind in nearly 10 years. The research was intended to determine consumer wants and current brand perceptions within the three key markets of France, Germany and Spain. The resulting insights would then be used to adapt and refine the group’s future marketing and creative communications strategy, with the ultimate goals of repositioning the brand “Scotland ” within the tourism sector and reigniting consumer interest within the three stated key territories.

The process

Nunwood carried out a series of in-depth, qualitative workshops at six different locations within the three countries. The success of the research depended on careful field coordination of the international research and on the success of ongoing partnerships between Nunwood and research agencies in each of the three countries. Being aware of the cultural differences in each of these countries, Nunwood was able to work with each agency’s strengths and weaknesses, allowing them substantial freedom to conduct their leg of the research “their way,” without compromising the quality of the overall project.

The team worked with a carefully chosen respondent group which included habitual visitors to Scotland  as well as prospective strategic targets, in order to ensure that the research outcomes were relevant to both current and potential future consumers.

Within the groups, Nunwood reviewed respondent associations with a number of nations and holiday destinations, not revealing Scotland  as the subject of the research until quite late in the process, in order to contextualize their responses and gauge perceptions. Nunwood went on to look at elements of activity that appeal when on a vacation or short break, in order to understand the key hooks and triggers that would appeal to different vacationer types.

The research went on to utilize existing imagery of Scotland to elicit spontaneous responses based on emotional experience. Overall it could be broken down into a series of key questions:

  • What are the current consumer perceptions of the brand Scotland?
  • Which aspects of the country are most appealing/would motivate a person to visit?
  • Which of these aspects then appeal specifically to each of their market target countries, and thus would a generic, pan-European communications strategy be feasible? (This would represent a huge cost saving.)

Unmet needs

Once the research was completed, the debrief - in this case, a facilitated workshop-style process with a carefully constructed audience - yielded remarkable insight and identified three core and as-yet-unmet consumer needs:

  • Social engagement/cultural immersion. Ad executions should advance from traditional, purely landscape-oriented messages to create the expectation within a visitor that they’ll experience high levels of social interaction with the archetypal friendly, welcoming, indigenous people.
  • Discovery and learning. The need for the brand to communicate feelings of unique discovery, surprise and the capacity for personal learning.
  • Flexibility and independence. Future communications should appeal to more spontaneous, proactive, “flexible” tourists with few pre-ordained plans.

Another important piece of information to emerge from the data was that these needs were consistent across all of the defined national markets, allowing for the generic, pan-European campaign that VisitScotland had hoped for.

The re-brand

The next step was to utilize these findings to develop and refine new, effective brand creative. The old campaign was based on a traditional and generic approach to advertising vacation/short-break destinations: a simple but heart-stoppingly beautiful picture of the destination, plus an image of a calm and relaxed vacationer. The initial wave of qualitative work showed that to “tourers” (the main segment targeted in this creative campaign), this kind of imagery was not particularly attention-grabbing or emotive. Rather than suggesting a myriad of vacation possibilities, and most crucially, the ability to explore for themselves, these kinds of images suggested isolation and an “off the shelf,” non-bespoke, vacation solution.

VisitScotland commissioned European advertising agency Consellgruppe to develop an insert- and print-advertising campaign based on the key recommendations outlined following the research.

“In contrast to previous campaigns, which left consumers very much on the outside looking in, we wanted this creative to be experiential and engaging, with the brand talking to the consumer rather than at them,” says Andreas Kleissl, management supervisor at Consellgruppe.

The resultant work, christened “the white line concept,” answered the brief, as defined by the research recommendations. Any engaging creative for VisitScotland needed to underline elements of: sociability and cultural immersion, discovery and learning, and freedom and independence. Nunwood tested the creative mock-ups across the three nations in a second wave of qualitative workshops several months later and made final edits based on this. The designs and the concept researched remarkably well, with the friendly and informal tone really appealing to the tourer segment.

“White lines” consists of a series of panoramic, visually rich landscape/ scenery shots, featuring the tagline “Scotland, Welcome to Our Life.”

While the composition of these images hints at the wealth of things to discover in Scotland, a white, hand-drawn line runs through the scene, tracing the path a visitor could take. Short, scribbled stories, written in the first-person tense and dotted at points on the line, are indicative of the situations a visitor could experience during their time in Scotland.

Story examples include:

“I spoke to a lovely lady, thought she was the gardener, but turned out she owns the castle.”

“Got stuck in a herd of sheep - the Scottish way to slow down your life.”

Well-received

To substantiate initial positive feedback, and make sure that this line of creative was on-track, on-brand and effectively delivering the key messages all parties had agreed upon, Nunwood conducted a series of one-on-one conversation studies in France, Germany and Spain, to gauge direct consumer response on the new campaign. With the exception of a few small refinements, the creative was very well-received and the new campaign was promptly rolled out across all three European markets.

The final stage of the project was the post-execution evaluation, which was undertaken by another independent research agency to ensure objectivity. The goal in this instance was to quantify the conversion from potential visitors to likely visitors as measured by monitoring requests for VisitScotland brochures and tracking any increase in traffic to the official Web site.

A conversion study in Germany  and France (no figures were available for Spain ) showed an increase in return on investment from 13:1 in 2002, to 25:1 post-implementation of the new campaign in 2004. This increase in ROI was qualified by:

• An additional 180,000 VisitScotland Web hits were generated by traffic to the French and German gateway sites - an increase of 200 percent from the 2003 figures.

• Brochure requests in 2004 vs. 2002 had increased by 68 percent in Germany, and 126 percent in France (Figures 1 and 2).

Refresh the understanding

The findings helped refresh VisitScotland’s understanding of its three key European markets. Previously, insight was based on ad-hoc research and inherent knowledge, hence this research helped to “open up the box” and create a renewed focus on meeting the needs of Scotland  ’s very specific (and varied) visitor types. One key finding is that while there are very clearly demarcated types of visitors to Scotland (“city breakers,” who typically make short visits to major European cities; tourers; walkers), these correlate closely over the three European markets in question. The perceptions of Scotland were, in other words, remarkably similar and strongly defined across the markets. The conclusion, borne out by the second wave of qualitative workshops, was that the resulting European creative campaign should be pan-European and not individually targeted to each market, resulting in a huge cost saving to VisitScotland.

“The results prove that a centrally coordinated campaign with a consistent approach and consistency of message has resulted in more efficient use of budgets and increased interest in Scotland  as a holiday destination,” says Annabel Kohler, international marketing manager, VisitScotland.

“The success of this project can be largely attributed to VisitScotland’s insight into our own research needs, and our foresight in developing long-term partnerships with Nunwood and our creative agencies, whilst maintaining a wide internal audience.

“By employing a flexible, inclusive approach, Visit Scotland has increased insight into its varied European customer base, and has utilized this insight to leverage a massive increase in Scotland ’s visibility and positioning as a must-visit destination. And, most importantly, the business has made a substantial cost saving by successfully using one generic creative execution across Europe rather than a bespoke campaign in each country.”