It’s time to hear from Industry professionals whether the marketing strategies. really work in ‘Real Life’ tourism businesses. The topic this week is why branding affects everything in your business.
We interviewed Rodrigo Atuesta, CEO and managing partner from Impulse Travel about understanding his guests with a buyers persona, in this interview we discuss another topic about branding.
Key takeaways:
-Branding isn’t just your name, tagline or URL
-Your brand and your purpose is inextricably linked to company culture
-Your staff and your partners are internal customers – You talk to them in the same way as your brand would speak to guests.
-Having a strong brand voice and purpose – connects to guests on a much personal level
-Who you are as a brand should be communicated all over your website. – your brand personality (voice,style, behavior) its not just a tagline, it’s everything including the pictures you use
-Your guests are emotional beings they buy based on their emotions – they buy into our brand emotionally and that includes our company culture
Here is the transcript of our conversation (frankly its much better to watch the video though! )
Dorene: Rodrigo, I want to talk to you today about branding and finding your story and just general marketing communications. I know you know I’ve worked together with your tour company impulse Immersive Travel Experiences. And we spent some time working on your WHY statement and mission statements as well as your brand personality. Just really understanding your voice style and behavior.
And I’d really like to know for the audience what kind of impact this had on your business specifically by actually really understanding your brand really well. What does that do for your business?
Rodrigo: Well for me it’s pretty connected to culture. So, in the way that you understand what you stand for your values and your purpose you have a strong basis for the culture. And the culture is the way that you connect personally to what you’re doing everyday and not only you but all the people that work with you. So that’s the first thing and it helps a lot for identifying who are the people that you should be working with as a way to work in their recruitment processes and the way that you write job descriptions, to know who is right fit for the culture.
And second, what’s very important is that interest of the communication, once you know that your culture is your brand, you understand your culture and what you stand for because you’re connected to it in a very personal level so you can understand how to communicate that as a brand. So, it’s very important to be efficient in terms of communication and the way you talk to a consumer. The way that you talk the partners and the way also that you connect with the people that are inside the company, so the kind of internal customer. The other important part is that it helps a lot for the website. In our case to let people understand what we stand for because people are not just buying a tour or a service. People are buying a whole ideal or they’re supporting a cause or they’re being part of a movement. So, if you know how to communicate it, then you are going to see great results in your marketing efforts.
Dorene: That’s great. I love how you said there’s an internal piece to it. So, with your staff and I love that you guys actually even put a brand manual together of all those things, so, every time you have a new person working there they understand exactly what your brand is what you stand for. What kind of words you use to explain your brand. I love that. And then, to your point the external part. So, do you find that when you’ve gone through this work about your purpose and what you stand for do your guests care about that?
Rodrigo: Oh yeah, yeah of course they care about that because it doesn’t all only connect me and the rest of my team to our work at a personal level, but it also connects our audience to a personal level. So, people buy things based on their emotions and they then look for the actual facts to back up their decisions. So, the culture and the way that the brand is a manifestation of the culture, it connects to people at an emotional level. So, it allows a whole new space of the way they would generate leads and the way we manage leads and the way we manage to reach the relationship we have with our guests.
Dorene And what things did you do on your website that articulate your brand to your consumer.
Rodrigo: It’s all over. It’s not just a tagline. It’s not just the name is not just the motto. it’s not only about us. It’s also the way, the kind of images we use. It’s also the way we write our products. It’s also the kind of products that we offer to the market. So it’s not only one specific thing but the great thing about the work we did together is that it was the basis for understanding many aspects of the business from product creation to communication to internal management or even recruitment.
