The United States of America is often referred to as the “land of dreams” and sees more international visitors each year than I can count. What the US-of-A has not seen, however, is a national campaign, promoting and highlighting all of the perceived awesomeness the land of the free has to offer – until now.
Brand USA is the new tourism marketing organization responsible for marketing and promoting the United States to international visitors. They have created a partnership with JWT, America’s largest advertising agency and the organization’s new agency of record, to unveil the first US national campaign: Discover America.
Did that give you a warm and fuzzy feeling? Did it make you proud to be an American? You don’t have to answer. The campaign (which launched last month), is a $150-million marketing effort to promote the good ‘ol U.S. to worldwide travelers after a decline in the share of world travels seen in the decade following 9/11.
The real work, however, came before the conception of the campaign itself. The campaign team set out to understand the existing perceptions the international resident and potential world traveler has of the US. From the data collected, it was discovered that people love the perception of freedom and possibility that America offers as well as the unification of various cultures. It was these discoveries that shaped the rest of the campaign – the video, the website, the social media platforms, etc. How do we know? Because we do this!
While we haven’t seen very many marketing campaigns geared to promote an entire country, we can imagine the approach to marketing the United States and all of its 50-states-of-greatness isn’t much different than marketing somewhere as small as, let’s say, Denton, TX (oh how we love the little D). In order to successfully market a place, a destination, or any other preexisting entity, you must first learn the preconceptions associated with it. Doing so shapes the rest of the initiatives as no two places are alike. That’s the beauty in destination and tourism marketing.
While this is the first national marketing campaign we’ve seen from the United States, they certainly aren’t the only ones making moves in the whole globally-marketing-a-country thing. A couple of my favorite national marketing campaigns are:
Tourism Australia:
The United Kingdom:
Seeing this campaign is like a breath of fresh air. The beauty of marketing destinations is that when it’s done right, we all win. Know any notable national marketing campaigns? Let us know!
