This lesson provides a summary of branding and how to prioritise it according to need &
budget.
At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
- Identify and understand the value of the brand of prominent international tourism brands.
- Identify outstanding requirements for your tourism brand.
So, then... What is a brand?
The things that come up most commonly is that people think a brand is a logo or website or letterhead or a piece of packaging, but those things aren't the brand, they are just the visual identifiers or badges associated with the product or service.A brand is the meaning we give to a product or service, how we feel about something in our hearts and minds. It's the story, the personality, the promise a brand makes to meet our expectations in certain ways, the collection of experiences we have every time we engage with a brand through the product, its services or people that work for it, that all collectively make up what a brand is.
So says branding expert Lorraine Carter, in the video below. Watch now for an excellent lesson that should very quickly have you understanding what branding is and isn't.
Brands live in peoples' hearts and minds and branding is the activities engaged in by the brand owners to help people feel the way they do about those products or services, all of which gives them a compelling reason to buy, repeatedly.
The next video starts with the same question but goes on to summarise a few of the important components - the visual identifiers and messaging - of a brand that we will examine in the coming lessons.
Summary
- Branding is collective, shared, similar feelings and associations.
- Branding is emotional and rational meaning.
- Brands live in people's hearts and minds.
- Branding is the activities engaged in by brand owners to help people feel the way they do about those products or services, all of which gives them a compelling reason to buy repeatedly.
Over to you
The next lesson is a survey to assess the status of your tourism business's brand. Do you have a bit of a brand? None at all? A very strong one?Answer each question as carefully as you can. You will not be assessed on the answers - these are merely to help you think about your tourism brand and to get a sense of what you need to work on and where to begin.