Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
or brand community. Nevertheless the classic branding paradigm is becoming tired and may
now be beginning to lose its edge. As consumers grow less and less passive and are increasingly
more savvy about marketing and commercial realism, brands must modify their approach.
Reading consumers is becoming more complex and multidimensional in nature. In the future
the most successful brands will be those that abandon the traditional top-down approach in
favour of bottom up strategies whereby the consumer is an active participant in the design of the
overall brand experience - in effect tomorrow's megabrands will be the consumer's agents as
opposed to producers', thus pioneering a transformation from trademarks to trust marks using
trust-based marketing.
The challenge for marketers is that consumers in the future will want less not more, sense
not nonsense and above all they want companies to inject simplicity into marketing. The time
when brands preached and consumers listened is no longer as dominant as it once was. This
means repositioning tourism brands to survive in an environment of knowledgeable and cynical,
marketing literate consumers who no longer seek solace in false brand gods, hype and spin. In a
society where brands are now becoming 'mental pollutants' and the traditional 'Marketing
Medicine' (e.g. I buy therefore I am and to buy is to be perceived) is increasingly diagnosed more
as a 'disease', we are now witnessing the era of
demarketing
chic.
Brands can become negative baggage as they are undermined by the very values they own in
the mind of the consumer. The deferential consumer, conditioned to 'salivate' and desire upon
being 'buzzed' by brands, has been buried along with the golden era of marketing. Consumers
are already becoming increasingly brand immune and in some cases they are developing 'brand
allergies'. Consumers are no longer willing to be forced to absorb brand messages. As a
consequence brands may lose control of their own image. Nonetheless they can turn this to an
advantage of content creation via prosumption and associated buzz generated by consumers
themselves. Brands must move from a marketing model that says, 'I'm going to talk to you and
you better listen up' to an experiential model.
The new realities of branding are upon us and innovative companies are dispensing with the
mass economy tactics of the twentieth century and replacing them with tactics more suited to
the new consumer economy. Tourism marketers must then recognize that markets consist
of human beings and not segmentation typologies. Markets can no longer be treated as pure
demographics, geo-demographics or psychographics in terms of segmentation bases with brands
to fi t each neat category. Markets actually consist of human beings each with unique needs
and desires. This awareness, coupled with less passive consumers, prompts the need for a new
model of brand relations - the 'Brain to Brain' model. Companies must adopt an intelligent and
integrated marketing and management approach that seeks to establish and nurture 'intelligent
dialogue' with customers, which ironically may mean for some brands a return to classical
marketing: solving people's problems at a profi t period.
As brands evolve to ensure an intelligent dialogue with customers, ever greater demand for
(emotional) authenticity and value will be desired by consumers. The emotional value
is
the
economic value or momentary worth of feelings when consumers positively (or negatively)
experience branded products and services. Emotional value, as much as quality or any other
product attribute or dimension of a tourism brands worth can make or break a business. We live
in a world where the 'little things' really do matter - each encounter be it physical or virtual and
no matter how brief, is a micro interaction which makes a deposit or withdrawal from our
rational and emotional subconscious. As such if companies do not handle consumers' emotional
needs and wants satisfactorily, brands are at risk. Incorporating emotional design into the
development and branding of the tourism product is becoming a necessity for tourism and travel
providers. We will see an increased move towards branding as a form of immersive experience
