Case Studies and Templates

Introducing Product & Experience

Product development is a key pillar of any destination strategy and it is important to know how to create new product opportunities and ensure the product and experience on offer in the destination supports the brand and its development.

The growing trend in how destinations see their role in the visitor cycle has shifted heavily towards ensuring the experience in the destination matches and supports the brand, and the DMOs today have to acknowledge this and prioritise it.

At the #DTTT we developed a Product and Experience Framework to support this idea explaining the pillars of experience strategy. We have been actively working with DMOs to develop their own experience strategies following these pillars and today we are unveiling it as part of this report.

In this report you will learn how to move in the product and experience realm, from a discovery process to the storytelling and distribution of experiences.

You will learn how products have to be aligned with the right audience but most of all with the brand, how key local partners are fundamental in the creation of tourism experiences but also fundamental is the creation of stories around the experiences that are marketed to the visitors.

The creation of signature experiences is a great starting point to define a new role for the DMO, a role centred around the needs of visitors but also on the characteristics of the destination, on its sense of “Localhood” and involvement of local people in the right places. Packaging products and creating content around it is nowadays essential to provide always more appealing experiences to consumers.

A single and unique experience can be further developed and the creation of a series of itineraries and trails will be a great way of enhancing the offering of the destination consistently. Also in this case it will be essential to reflect what the brand pillars are and what the destination is like; for these reasons, do not limit your creativity and try to design experiences that are grouped under different neighbourhoods or niche experiences that target specific narrow segments of the market to boost the chances of conversion.

Brand-Product Harmony Brand, product & audience alignment In this 12-part Transformation Series, you’ll see we talk a lot about the brand and its values. This is because without a strong definition of your brand, the rest of your strategy is going to struggle to gain traction or get any real cut-through with consumers.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at how ‘Brand Values’ translate into your ‘Product and Experience Strategy’.

How do 'Brand Values' translate into product

Starting with Brand Values, you should be able to define this into a series of ‘pillars’, making up a significant part of your brand’s architecture. These values might be very tangible assets such as “Greenland’s Wilderness” or they may be less tangible associations which are very strong and designed to describe the qualitative and emotional values, such as “In Harmony with Nature”.

If we now take this down to a product level, what’s key is to think “how can we design experiences which align with these values” and perhaps to also consider why? In fact, for most destinations the key motivational factor in looking at ‘Experience Design’ is not to create a bookable product or develop a commercial arm of their activities, it’s to deliver ‘fulfilment’ on the brand’s promise.

Traditionally, destinations have created an aspirational brand image with minimal regard to how accurately it reflects the actual experiences held by visitors in the destination. Their focus has rather been to accentuate its qualities, not necessarily reflect them as they are. Before digital transformed pretty much everything, this was just fine, but now with device in hand and the ability to get a transparent perspective on anything, consumers are distrusting of brand messaging alone.

This seismic shift in brand marketing and the increasing maturity of digital consumers, has led to the rise of the ‘experience economy’ and what is known as ‘experiential travel’, when travellers seek more personally fulfilling experiences over landmarks.

So what’s Brand Match all about? Well, finding ‘brand match’ is about finding that sweet spot, where experiences in the destination reflect both the brand and the target audience, or in this case the visitor.

Designing experiences around supporting the brand is all about finding brand match and designing experiences which deliver on two things for the brand:

• Further building or strengthening the brand’s values
• Offering fulfilment on the brand’s promise

For the consumer, they must equally bring equal value in:

• Responding to their individual needs
• Creating a unique visitor experience

Beyond this, you may ask yourself, so what is the sense in DMOs designing experience? Well, there are a number of reasons.

• Offering 'fulfilment' on the brand overall, ensuring experiences in the destination match visitor expectations and correspond well with content and marketing messaging.
• Shaping content around experiences which help accentuate the brand, such as strengthening the brand identity of a destination with excellent gastronomy and local produce with a 'farm to fork' experience meeting producers and experiencing gastronomic food experiences.
• Offering unique perspectives, with experiences designed to help influencers get a more exclusive 'behind the scenes' immersion in the brand and create brilliant supportive content.
• Positioning the destination more competitively by actively creating 'reasons to go' which respond specifically to the needs of certain markets seeking unique experiences.
• Using a signature experience programme of experience stage as a catalyst to helping both existing and new businesses create a refreshed product offering better aligned with the destination brand and more fitting to the needs of today's digital travellers.

With so many things to consider, the one thing to keep in mind at all times is 'what are our brand's core strengths' and 'how to we design experiences around the needs of our visitors'.

Understanding the market has shifted

Whilst there's a general shift in travel towards experiential travel, adoption of new trends is generally being driven by millennial visitors, who are digitally savvy, demanding in their expectations and in search of fulfilment. Millennial travellers are heavily influenced by peers; they want to discover a destination through social recommendation and look to experience it like a local would - or, better yet, get to know it better than a local.

Millennial visitors are also unique in that the interests which align them, motivations for travel and characteristics can no longer be defined so easily according to market but more according to interests. This is also driving a shift towards 'niche marketing' as a trend.

So, considering this shift, creating unique experiences in the destination is all about supporting a new kind of visitor, one that is more demanding and more in search of.

Whilst not exclusively the case, experience design is more often than not about providing a different kind of offering that is on the one hand highly bespoke and on there other 'off the shelf' with independent travellers in mind.

Starting your strategy out with a set of 'brand matched' signature experiences, you'll then be able to take and adapt these into new experiences better catered for more traditional visitors from markets, according to their needs.

Lastly, we've seen a huge rise in a number of brands in recent years who really understand how to 'talk to Millennials' and far from disrupting traditional industry, they are in fact driving demand in an entirely new way. This is especially the case with AirBnB, who disrupted the traditional accommodation sector, showing that today's visitors increasingly want to travel like a local, have more meaningful experiences and immerse themselves getting to know the culture and people of the destination as equal temporary residents.

Their next move, has been to take these experiences further with AirBnB Experiences, an entirely new 'nonconventional' approach to offering 'things to do' in the destination. Shunning the traditional tour operator, AirBnB recognised that their growing user base, wanted to get to know people and the destination in a more interest-oriented way, more intimate, unique and exclusive and certainly not as a 'tourist'. As is often the case, disruptive businesses such as AirBnB don't only reflect a change in the market, they drive a change in the market and in effect have created a huge groundswell of demand.

So how is the 'experiential travel' space looking today? Well it's the fastest growing segment of the tourism industry and where we're seeing the biggest investments in technology and growth. It is not a space DMOs can afford to ignore but as always, it's about finding where the DMO can create value.

We believe, this value is rooted in creating brand matched 'signature experiences', driving value beyond the commercial nuts and bolts of selling experiences.

The DTTT Experience Framework

The DTTT has developed a framework to help DMOs understand how to design Signature Experiences that are aligned with the brand and that can fulfil the target audience.

1. Brand Match

It all starts with the brand

A clearly defined brand should be the starting point to create appealing experiences for visitors. Experiences could reflect the destination brand's pillars and support them by looking back to awareness building.

Taylor experiences to audiences

Today's travellers seek more and more unique, personalised and "off the shelf" engaging experiences. It is important to have a clear definition of personas and markets to adapt experiences, but also a strategy to reach these audiences.

A natural extension of the brand

Products should be seen as the natural extension of the brand, offering the opportunity to provide authentic fulfilment to visitors. This is where experience ambassadors and rich storytelling come into play, linking message with fulfilment.

2. Organising and curating

Signature experiences should be the unification of local people and key places at the destination:

Local partners

Local industry is at the core of experience providers needed to craft the signature experiences. They are fundamental to establish strong local partnerships and to offer a service.

Key places, local people

Key places are the best spots of the destination for your right target audience, they could be touristic or off the beaten path. Local people are able to offer a service but also talk about the destination from a unique and authentic perspective which is deeply rooted in the sense of place they convey.

Pairing experiences

By curating the offer, DMOs can pair the right experiences which really help lift the brand and offer a unique stand-out experience. Product pairing represents a key opportunity for DMOs who should select the highlights of a destination and pair them by similar theme or following a rationale for which is possible to create visual references anchoring stories, and content to places and attracting specific target audiences to live unique and memorable signature experiences.

• Trails allow to curate a range of individual itineraries based on different audience needs and different thematic clusters.
• A map clustering experiences by theme or by geographical area is useful to guide visitors in space while experiencing the destination.
• Pairing tourism products is the secret to craft a signature experience where the essence of the brand is.
• Experiences can be grouped under specific themes coherent with the destination image and appealing to specific audiences.

3. Communicating

Hero, Hub, Hygiene content strategy

Stories shaped around the brand experience represent a powerful and compelling message for potential visitors. A Hero, Hub, Hygiene content strategy helps lift the brand experience, seeking to build an image for the destination together with true ambassadors, taking their stories further as they become not only brand but experience ambassadors too.

Signature Experience Ambassadors

Designing product experiences together with destination ambassadors helps build links between the most authentic voices representing the destination, unique and incredible visitor experiences and curated product pairings.

The combination of different places and products into signature experiences is perfect to build meaningful stories around the strong connections between people, businesses and the land. This leverages a variety of stories to promote the destination and provides new perspectives for the eyes of consumers.

New products and experiences often differentiate the destination from its competitors. For this reason it is important to have Ambassadors to promote them. Identify the great ambassadors of your destination, by integrating them into the product and experience offer, this ensures the destination's visitor experience delivers on the brand. The stories shaped around the brand, seek to build on the already powerful content shot with ambassadors, taking their stories further as they become not only brand but experience ambassadors too.

4. Packaging and Distributing

Aggregation & Experience Platform

Aggregating destination experiences, packaging them and distributing them is a key strategic question for destinations today. How far you should go, depends on where you see yourself playing in the visitor cycle and where the DMO can create real value. For some DMOs, packaging and distributing stops accuracy, where product pairings are developed into signature experiences and distributed through a content strategy. For others, the potential value of creating 10 Product & Experience and supporting a product experience platform is a logical next step and helps industry see commercial value in addition to brand value.

The Discovery Process

Understanding different product packaging approaches In starting to understand the different approaches you can take to developing experiences, it’s first of all important to understand that as a DMO, this is not at all an exercise in creating a commercial business or revenue arm within the organisation. Experience has taught us, that more often than not, when DMOs attempt to commercialise their activities, it leaves them conflicted, struggling to demonstrate value, battling against the tide of global brands and losing sight of where they can truly create value.

Keeping that in mind, let’s bring over everything we reflected on with ‘Brand Match’ and see how this looks when we start to develop tangible product which aligns with the brand. As we said at the end of the first section, we strongly believe the DMO’s value is rooted in creating ‘Signature Experiences’ and developing either a Signature Experience Strategy or an Experience Development roadmap to support this.

Starting Out If you’re thinking “this all sounds great, but how do we get started”, the great news is that you shouldn’t feel overwhelmed by the task and opportunity at hand. There’s surely already heaps of great experiential, ‘millennial tuned’ product already out there, so you don’t need to go out immediately and ‘build’ new experiences.

There are some really straightforward, more strategically tilted things, that you can do with your internal teams to hit the ground running, and also start to build some structured thinking around your strategy. Here’s what we recommend as a starting point:

Discovery - Trails, Maps and Lists

With your destination thematically ‘sliced and diced’, the next step is to think about discovery trails. Again, here’s a great way to create something at a product development level, without building anything bookable at this point.

Millennial travellers are overwhelmingly independent travellers and so want to discover the destination in their own way, at their own pace and around their own interests, influenced by peers.

Self discovery is great and there is a number of ways you can support this and really start to organise experiences in a way which is unique and really supporting the brand.

• Instamaps - why not create an Instamap of a neighbourhood, region or even an entire country. This is a great way to drive discovery around some of the most instagrammed spots, empowering social discovery and shaping experiences around social authority.
• “Local or Social Guides To” - in fact, this is about to explode as the latest trend. Facebook have started to create ‘Facebook Local Guides to…” in two key cities, creating mini guides based on what locals are talking about. Find your unique angle on this, but it’s a great way to support discovery around lesser known places.
• Itineraries - these can be ‘very detailed’ or ‘very inspirational’, however for the purposes of staying on brand, inspirationally oriented itineraries can help you to give catchy names and titles to ‘bucket list’ or ‘epic’ trips. You can design them around themes, such as “The foodie’s road-trip through California’ or the ‘Epic Journey into Lapland’, for example. Creating itineraries is a great way to provide ideas and pointers but leave the independent traveller to choose themselves. It’s also a great way to promote a certain type of travel, such as sustainable travel with multi-modal low-carbon options. Both Visit California and Tourism Australia have shown how great itinerary development can really support discovery.
• Curated Lists - perhaps the lightest form of development, ‘must see’, ‘top ten’ lists and so on are a starting point to gather a more ‘curated’ approach to showing the destination. With all of the above, working with known chefs or local ambassadors can be a great way to do this in partnership and have that authoritative endorsement to support it.

Pairings and Signature Experiences

Working with local businesses is a great opportunity to take your product development work to the next level. We suggest workshopping ideas out around themes with businesses and hand-picking businesses who show a willingness to create new, unique and unconventional experiences to take their own offer further.

A great way to collaborate with businesses and for the DMO to show its value, is to focus on the strength of bringing businesses together to collaborate where they would have been unlikely to do so otherwise.

This brings us first of all to Product Pairings.

Product Pairings

Some of the most unique experiences are when two or three businesses collaborate to create paired experiences. This can be a restaurant known for its gastronomic take on local produce, with a forager or local producers who welcome visitors to discover process of selecting and finding great produce. In a scenario like this, different businesses might have the initiative to combine their efforts, with a collaborative ‘farm to fork’ menu, where visitors can pick berries, forage in the nature or discover produce on the farm and then see how this comes together in high-end cuisine, combining an outdoor experiencing with a dining experience.

Another example of product pairing might be a local spa teaming up with local naturalists, to create a combined experience in the nature and also in the treatment rooms, where guests discover the origin on things such as seaweed based treatments themselves.

Designing the process of product pairing requires good partnership with local businesses and entrepreneurs, a willingness to look outside of the traditional tourism industry and an openness to bespoke creative thinking around how different experiences can come together.

Here at the #DTTT, we start-out with an ideation process, drill down to clustering the most unique aspects of different businesses according to the destination’s brand themes and then seeing how they could come together as either ‘loosely’ or ‘tightly’ packaged experiences, where you’ll need to remain open to how that could happen.

Signature Experiences

From Product Pairings, you have the perfect recipe for creating ‘Signature Experiences’. The purpose of these is to create your ‘hero’ or ‘headline’ experiences, which best support the brand’s values and are prime for amazing storytelling.

Start out by selecting 4-5 experiences which you can take further and develop as Signature Experiences. This is all about moving these experiences into the storytelling process, where a strong hero, hub and hygiene approach to building out content around those experiences can help deliver on your brand’s messaging and strengthen the overall appeal and demand generation for the destination.

For businesses who put in the work to create unique Signature Experiences, the incentive of content support from the DMO should be enough to really motivate them to get involved. These Signature Experiences should eventually become your destination brand’s story, offering depth and fulfilment to support messaging and promises.

Packaging and Product Types

As you have learned in this section, there are many ways in which product and experiences can be built, packaged and presented. There’s no right or wrong way to approach your product strategy, what’s key is to consider the range of options and find what works best for you.

Here are some ideas around different product types:

• Passes - many cities already have city cards, think about how these might work well shaped around themes or designed to drive discovery beyond the traditional set of attraction. A regional or country-wide pass can really drive discovery specifically around a thematic pillar of the brand.
• Events & festivals - these are great opportunities to create demand to the destination and if it is a good brand fit could make good strategic sense to focus on them. Great examples of this include the Tour de Yorkshire, where the Yorkshire Tourist Board capitalised on the value of the Tour de France starting stage to develop an annual cycling event which is now a big draw to the region. On the absolutely other end of the scale, Saalbach create Saalbach Storybase, as an annual event for only carefully selected influencers, supporting content and awareness needs.
• Trails & Itineraries - little more to add here, but just remember the sky is the limit. Think about a number of ‘hero’ trails and build out from there, once you’ve developed the first few, you’ll see that you can keep going more granular or deeper on the themes.
• Ambassador Curated Experiences - fostering your local ambassador relationships are going to be key for powerful authentic brand storytelling. Ambassadors might be notably famous and help you create large-scale awareness, but they might also be locally known, bringing a strong connection to the theme, such as a well known local chef. Work with ambassadors as your partners, co-create both trails, menus, experiences and events.
• Tours and Expert Led - well, this is not to be mistaken with the traditional model of tours. This is about having a great expert led experiences ran by people who are passionate about their knowledge, interest or the place they’re rooted in. Here’s where you can really look outside of tourism and also see how locals and in particular those that are missing out on the value of tourism can be brought into the fold. In Dublin, a social commerce does just this, training and hiring homeless people to become local tour guides. A win win for visitors and the city alike and really demonstrating the positive value of the visitor economy.

This should give you lots of food for thought.

Partnering with local business and brand ambassadors

Finding incredible Brand Ambassadors Whilst traditionally your DMO may have leaned towards a membership base, one of the seismic shifts in the DMO world is in the recognition that being member driven doesn’t necessarily equate to value and servicing visitor needs.

As you will see throughout this series, the importance of being relentlessly visitor driven is something to always keep in mind. When it comes to the visitor experience, DMOs have in the past been driven either solely or largely by the needs of their industry members and not those of the visitors. What’s the problem with this? Well, if a hotel or visitor experience doesn’t match visitor expectations, should we continue to promote them as the best thing to do in the destination?

This biased objectivity of the DMOs has eaten away at the trust of visitors, along with the surge of peer reviewed recommendations, which today trump official tips.

This is where ambassadors and entrepreneurs both have a key role to play, in changing the status quo.

Ambassadors

If you haven’t already identified ambassadors to work with, this is a crucial part of the product and experience development work too. Later down the line, these will be your partners in co-creation and curation of great experiences, authored together and showing a truly grounded and local insider perspective.

As with every other aspect of product strategy, Ambassadors must align with your brand, this means, finding brand ambassadors who are well suited to your brand pillars and audience needs. Another important point is to also identify ambassadors who you can easily work with, even considering a commercial agreement, so they are compensated for their time and contribution.

Helsinki is a great beacon of how DMOs are changing the game here.

Their new site is driven by ‘local guides’, who provide an interest titled view on the city. This includes famous DJs, to bands, to local entrepreneurs. Certainly not your traditional tourism industry members.

Entrepreneurs

As with ambassadors, entrepreneurs are great partners in your strategy. Look outside your traditional member list and look at entrepreneurs who are passionately driven and actively involved in creating new concepts and experiences. They may well be working outside for the traditional tourism industry, in food and beverage, technology or even areas that you would have never considered appealing for visitors in the past.

Today, tech tours are a big hit in Silicon Valley, a demonstration of how visitors today are driven by their interests.

Storytelling & Building Awareness

Great, so you’ve identified your key partners in your product and experience strategy. Now comes the fun stuff.

With these relationships in-tow, you can now start to look for the stories. Ambassadors, entrepreneurs and uniquely crafted experiences all make for rich storytelling. Continue the partnership with them and look at where there are story opportunities in every step on the journey.

The misperception with content is often that we need to produce commercial content presenting a finished product. Some of the best content you’ll create around experiences, is the process of designing them in the first place. Build a great content team to follow the journey, create a series on ‘designing the signature experiences’ or getting to know the passionate people behind the experience. The sky here, really is the limit.

There’ll be more on this in the Content chapter, but our recommendation is to then follow your Experience Strategy through with a structured Hero, Hub and Hygiene Content Strategy, helping you to shape the image, deliver the depth and retain the interest throughout the discovery process.

Going beyond your core hero, hub and hygiene content, content opportunities can be found everywhere and are more often than not rooted in the product itself. Think about how you can show different perspectives on experiencing the product itself, for example creating ‘point of view’ content and clips from the visitor perspective or again from the ambassador perspective or even from an influencer perspective.

Sales & Distribution

Who's selling experiences? The Strategic conundrum for DMOs

Typically, when we talk to DMOs about commerciality selling anything through their websites, it is almost bound to stir some sort of reaction. For years now, DMOs have debated whether or not they should ‘sell’ through their websites, typically focused around accommodation. The conclusion invariably reached is that DMOs show to be focused on raising awareness and deriving increased spend in the destination, not accommodation bookings.

So how do destination experiences fit into this mix? Well, the market place is rapidly exploding, notably led by the following key players:

These companies combined are dominating the experience space, each with their own unique model. As this is a rapidly evolving market, it’s important to keep an eye on developments to see where it goes.

• AirBnB
• Get Your Guide
• TripAdvisor (which has now acquired)
• Bokun
• Viator

At this still relatively early point however, we believe that both AirBnB and Bokun offer two different approaches, which can be worth considering for DMOs.

So lots to think about back in your DMO, right? Whether you decide to take ‘that extra step’ and venture into bookability, will depend very much on where you feel your value as a DMO should exist and indeed the resources you have to support this. With SaaS (software as a service), integration is these days relatively simple and can offer clear wins in terms of bringing about a more seamless customer journey.

However, many DMOs will feel that their job stops at generating interest. A perfectly logical conclusion and one that you’ll have to take up with your internal teams and asses according to your strategy.

Continue to the next lesson