2G: Identifying and Developing Local Distinctiveness
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It includes examples of successful creation of local distinctiveness.
Local distinctiveness is a combination of the things that give a place its unique character.
Surveys consistently show that consumers want "experiences" from their holidays. In the battle to keep domestic consumers holidaying in this country local distinctiveness is an important tool. It offers visitors a compelling story about a place and highlights the differences between one place and another. It stimulates the wish to visit and experience a destination, recommend it to friends and family and to return.
It is one of the most important ways of giving a destination a competitive edge. It can:
- provide a strong foundation for effective marketing
- provide a means to engage the industry, local residents and other civic and public agencies
- give shape and coherence to the range of visitor information on offer
- drive the direction and content of product development.
Local distinctiveness can draw on any of the following:
- natural features – the landscape, characteristic habitats, vegetation and wildlife
- man-made features – the urban landscape, architectural styles, building materials, field boundaries, visitor attractions and historical sites
- heritage, culture and traditions – history, famous people (both living and past), cultural mix, events, festivals, music, dialects and the arts
- produce and industries – food and drink, crafts, shops, and means of production such as farming, fishing, mining, industrial manufacture.
Characteristics must be genuine; they need to have local traditional roots, although they do not specifically need to be historic.
Local distinctiveness is a powerful tourism marketing tool. It can help to:
- differentiate a destination from others and form the basis of a brand strategy
- provide the material for promotional themes
- direct product development opportunities.
In order to gain maximum benefit from aspects of local distinctiveness, a brand identity should be designed around key characteristics of the area.
Successful destination brands are associated with high product differentiation as well as highly distinctive quality and value. Local distinctiveness can play a big part in successful tourism destination branding.
In order to develop a brand based on a destination’s unique characteristics:
- identify the rational and emotional benefits of the destination’s product offering
- establish what local businesses, residents and visitors value about the area
- produce a positioning statement.
A brand is a combination of the rational and emotional benefits of a product offer.
Rational benefits are the tangible benefits of the destination. Those that are chosen to promote to the identified target markets should accentuate a destination’s local distinctiveness, demonstrate that the destination is unique and give the destination that all-important competitive edge.
One of the best ways to identify a destination’s rational benefits is to carry out an audit in the form of a SWOT analysis. Identifying a destination's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, provides the material to help form the basis of the brand, while at the same time focusing thoughts on potential markets.
Emotional benefits are those which will determine how the potential market will "feel" about the destination, for example: relaxed, stimulated or revitalised.
After identifying the rational and emotional benefits it is possible to develop the personality of the destination. The best way to think about this is to imagine describing the destination as a person; use words like: exotic, warm, friendly, exciting, welcoming, caring.
4C: The Product or What to Take to Market in Section 4 Destination Marketing provides more information on this important area of work.
Passionate People, Passionate Places is the image campaign for the North East directed by One North East the regional development agency. It incorporates tourism branding in a region-wide campaign covering all elements of the North East’s business, culture and sports offer. The brand is available to businesses and public agencies to use in their own promotional material and a brand manual can be downloaded from the RDA's website.
Ludlow is recognised as a centre of excellence for food and drink, a reputation built on the successful Ludlow and the Marches Food and Drink Festival. Ludlow is the home of the UK office of the "Slow Food" movement and was the first town in the UK to become a "Cittaslow" town, a designation linked to the Slow Food movement. Slow Food is described as: "a way of thinking. It is about caring for your town and the people who live and work in it or visit it. It is about protecting the environment, about promoting local goods and produce, and about avoiding the ‘sameness’ that afflicts too many towns in the modern world".
The County tourism partnership Go Leicestershire has broken the County of Leicestershire into a number of smaller destinations each with their own offer. The City of Leicester and Leicestershire Promotions have developed the One Leicester brand to link regeneration initiatives. It has used local celebrities to promote what is special about Leicester. It has provided an effective platform to develop a strong sense of place linked to local pride.
Engagement with partner agencies and the industry is crucial in identifying, promoting, interpreting and delivering the local distinctiveness of a destination. The visitor experience must live up to the brand offer.
Managers of the various public domains that make up the visitor experience (eg town centres, the countryside, the coast) and the representatives from the businesses that provide visitor services and facilities (accommodation, attractions, retail) should be involved from the start in the development of a destination brand.
Their support and buy-in to the work is essential to ensure that consistent interpretation of an area's local distinctiveness is carried across all parts of the visitor experience.
As well as involving them in the initial discussions to identify and build a destination’s distinctiveness there are some good examples of programmes to establish wider industry buy in. Programmes such as this help develop a strong sense of local pride, and empower businesses to champion their local area and acquire knowledge about an area's local distinctiveness that can be passed on to their visitors to enrich their stay.
The Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in Lancashire has produced a Sense of Place Toolkit that offers practical advice and ideas to businesses about how they can use the special characteristics of the area to boost their business and provide a richer experience for their visitors. The Toolkit can be downloaded at www.forestofbowland.com/publ_plans.asp
Know Your North Pennines is a training programme for anyone involved in visitor services operating in the area. It is run by a group of local businesses and supported by the North Pennines AONB and the Durham Tourism Partnership. The content is knowledge-based training celebrating the special qualities of the area delivered by local experts and covering a wide range, including geology, ecology, history and culture.
Alongside the training programme there are a series of products, events and festivals that celebrate and interpret the North Pennines distinctiveness such as the Northern Rocks Festival and the Northern Rocks Cycle Tour both highlighting the area’s unique geology, the Haltwhistle Walks Festival, a Hay Time History Weekend, and the North Pennines Storytelling Festival.
Local distinctiveness can be used as the platform for a range of product development initiatives. These can include:
- walks and cycle routes
- festivals and events
- lectures and talks
- guided walks programmes
- themed breaks (eg wildlife, food, arts and culture, etc)
- conservation holidays
- educational breaks (eg arts and crafts, local history, etc)
- food trails.
Marketed under a common brand they can be the rational offer to consumers that provides the bookable product behind the emotional appeal.
If you have established a strong industry buy-in of a destination's locally distinct offer then working with local businesses to develop products becomes significantly easier.
Local food is often a good place to start to explore local distinctiveness and build a unique product. There are many examples of successful local breakfast schemes around the UK. One of the first was the Real Bath Breakfast. There are an increasing number of successful festivals themed around a local specialty such as the Watercress Festival at Alresford in Hampshire or Ludlow's Marches Food and Drink Festival.
Most places are covered by a local food group (often County or region-based) who will be seeking to promote local producers and develop links with hospitality outlets. Destination managers should contact their local food group if they are thinking about developing products or promotional themes based around the local food offer. The Food from Britain website has a useful list of regional and County food groups.
Local produce can cover more than food. They include locally produced goods and artefacts, arts and crafts, and, in some areas where there are strong links to a specific trade or industry, manufactured goods.
Many of these goods can be sold through hospitality outlets as souvenirs of an area. Common Ground has launched a campaign to encourage the production and sale of local goods as souvenirs.
A guide to Food and Drink in Britain produced in 2003 by VisitBritain can be downloaded from Defra’s website.
Any marketing initiative based on local distinctiveness needs to be supported by information on destination websites and publications that informs visitors about the area’s special qualities and directs them to where they can be experienced.
Depending on the subject and the facilities available, the level of information required for visitors will vary. If a destination’s selling point is its heritage and historic buildings, visitors will simply need to be directed towards the museums and houses that offer and interpret that history.
If, however, the subject is, for example, wildlife then it is likely that the visitor will require more detailed information that explains what type of habitats there are, what species can be seen, and where best to observe them.
In cases such as these it is worth talking to partners who may already provide such information (eg the County Wildlife Trusts, RSPB, or local authority Countryside Management service).
Place making is the term used to describe the role that local authorities play in creating and maintaining the public environment of a destination. This involves not only their management of the infrastructure and facilities used by visitors but also their planning and policy-making role. Sympathetic policies aimed at the retention and development of an area’s local distinctiveness are critical in establishing a sense of place and underpinning the character of an area that forms the basis of a visitor brand and marketing campaigns.
The destination manager’s role in this is to ensure that local authority planners and policy makers are involved in the development of local distinctiveness as a tourism tool so that the decisions they make do not compromise or undermine the offer being made to visitors.
Project Chester is a good example of how tourism and the visitor economy can be built into a broader plan for an area that is driven by the wish to maximise local distinctiveness through the community planning process. The Project Chester document outlines the city council's "big picture" which covers culture, tourism, the economy, sport and leisure, enterprise, wildlife conservation and Chester at night.
The Hadrian’s Wall Country Partnership is another good example of where branding, product development and visitor information has been brought together under a distinct, locally significant theme. The development of a long distance footpath, the Hadrian’s Wall Country Bus service and themed events, all based in and around the World Heritage site has helped to bring together a visitor destination that crosses districts, county councils and RDA boundaries.
Oct 2008