Experiences like travel, dining, and family entertainment are unparalleled tools in the world of branding and consumer outreach. Each of these experiences is immersive and engaging, and they are some of the most joyful activities that consumers engage in. For example, taking a vacation is ranked the highest of all activities, with a Joy Score of 79 out of 100, while going out to eat is scored at 70/100, and visiting a theme park or amusement park is scored at 59/100.
Of course, unlike a product, experiences are fleeting, presenting brands with the challenge of determining how to capture them and market them as worthwhile to future customers. However, there is an evergrowing appetite for these experiences—for example, our research shows that 66% of Americans are likely to take a summer road trip in 2025. Therefore, experience brands must answer the question: How can you translate fleeting moments into long-lasting brand stories that drive loyalty and measurable growth?
Effective brand stories are foundational to this answer, allowing experiences to stick and giving interested consumers a chance to resonate with a particular activity. Understanding how to craft the right story can make all the difference in setting your experience brand apart from the others to entice prospective travelers. Blending strategies like storytelling, understanding your target audience, and engaging in thoughtful execution can help you create standout brand narratives.
Brand stories must be strong and uniquely crafted in order to resonate with consumers and be truly unforgettable. The following steps can help you transform experiences into brand stories that resonate and drive meaningful engagement.
We can all appreciate the value of an experience in the moment, but translating that experience into a communicable narrative is a bit of a challenge. How do you bottle up the intangible joy and emotion that an event provokes and then effectively capture that joy in a marketing campaign? Taking a broad look at your event and how it creates an impact can help you determine the right step to do so.
Step one is understanding the dose of joy that your brand can bring to your target consumers. Taking a vacation ranks highest on the joy score metric—other experiences, like eating out or visiting a theme park, are closely related. There is a universal appeal of these experiences that induces joy. Accurately capturing the joy in your brand experience is essential for maximizing the effects of your messaging.
The right data can help you capitalize on a strategy to gain tangible insights about the most meaningful and impactful elements of an experience, and tactics like social listening and data collection can allow you to capture that data. Gathering insights from your audience doesn’t have to be absurdly expensive—some strategies include:
Use this data-gathering process to understand what factors are bringing the most joy to your audience and then translate these elements into effective and emotionally resonant messaging.
The superpower of storytelling lies in its ability to access traveler’s emotions to make the destination seem exciting and worth exploring. This step requires building emotional stories for your target audience and curating these stories to resonate with your target audience based on the data and insights you collected at the start.
Your goal should be to combine your audience insights with tangible steps to focus on emotional engagement and make your experience truly unforgettable. Focus on the aspects of your brand that are most likely to resonate with your audience and hit on those aspects in your stories.
To weave emotion into your storytelling, consider the following strategies:
After all, vacations are the leading source of joy, and other experiences follow closely behind. Leveraging this understanding and incorporating joy in your storytelling to highlight these elements will only make your brand stories more impactful and create more likely customers.
Having a deep understanding of your audience empowers you to speak to them on a personal level. Investing in audience research to understand their needs will allow you to identify which aspects of your story will resonate with them most.
To understand your audience, you should focus on who they really are. It’s crucial that you understand not just their demographics but also psychographics. This information will give you greater insight into your audience’s interests, passions, and aspirations, allowing you to build stronger campaigns that are more likely to resonate with them. Consider questions like, what do they do each day? Where do they hang out? Do they spend more time at home or out and about?
Some strategies you can use to better understand your audience include:
Once you have a strong understanding of your audience, you’ll be in a better position to craft a story that speaks to their unique interests, values, and passions. For example, it’s known that travel, going out to eat, and visiting places like theme parks are key sources of bringing joy. As a travel or experience brand, you should break this down further to understand what elements of these experiences are most meaningful to your audience.
From there, you will be able to highlight the elements that are likely to bring the most joy. Is it the food? The history? The music scene? The answer will change based on who you’re trying to attract and the information you gather.
When done right, emotion-rich stories in your marketing can captivate your target audience and encourage them to experience the travel for themselves. Spice up your stories by including personal experiences, insights from locals, and gathering new angles to tell stories that have not been used 1,000 times before.
Strategies like immersion trips and community conversations can uncover authentic insights and enrich stories about your experience that can be spread outward. As you gather these stories, use your understanding of your audience to push those stories out through the best channels.
Paid media is the ad space you pay for so that you can reach your audience across channels. Some great examples of paid media include:
Earned media is gained by creating an experience so great that your audience is excited to share without payment. Some wonderful options for gathering earned media include:
Remember that your channels should reach your audience where you are most likely to find them. In other words, you shouldn’t post a billboard for an audience of stay-at-home moms or do a TV spot for a busy audience.
For example, Visit Tennessee established the “Tennessee Playcation” campaign, offering a new way to explore the state. This campaign recognized that Tennessee offers great potential as a family vacation but is outmatched in recognition by a place like Disneyworld.
The campaign created a toy catalog that presented the top family experiences in the state and sent it out to families for children to browse and receive a toy tied to the experience. Then, families were able to visit Tennessee to live those experiences for themselves.
This is just one example of how travel and experience brands should be creative in understanding their audiences and using that understanding to guide their outreach.
Your destination needs to stand out—highlight what makes your destination unique from just any travel destination. Do you have a vast culinary scene? Diverse cultural events? Natural landscapes that are worth a visit?
Don’t just name these attractions—highlight, define, and immerse your audience in them. What will visitors think, see, and feel during their experience with these destinations? Do your best to speak to these emotions during your marketing efforts through storytelling.
Make these experiences exciting by using storytelling to highlight the features that provide your destination with unique value and differentiate your business from your competitors. In this strategy, it’s crucial to be honest and authentic—brutally honest. Even being transparent about your experience’s shortcomings in the brainstorming session may sound like a questionable strategy, but in reality, it allows you to emphasize the true benefits of your experience and build brand trust around authentic communication.
The following case studies demonstrate the power of using an unforgettable brand story to differentiate a travel destination and generate meaningful impressions.
When people think of tourist destinations with beautiful beaches, Mississippi is not the first place people think of. Coastal Mississippi understood this, so instead of leaning into the less exciting beaches, their Secret Coast campaign focused on the many other hidden gems that the area had to offer.
The campaign presented the many other aspects that Coastal Mississippi had to offer throughout its 62 miles of towns, including the area’s art, entertainment, outdoor attractions, and friendly people. It also emphasized that these things are even more precious as the area is still a “secret,” given the lower visitation compared to other tourist destinations.
With this approach, the campaign brought 113 million impressions through paid media outreach and 1 billion impressions in earned media coverage. The Secret Coast campaign paid off and demonstrated the power of leaning into your strengths and remaining authentic over trying to outperform your competition.
Oslo created a tongue-in-cheek campaign that spotlighted a local questioning why anyone would want to visit the Nordic city. The story presented by the campaign was that the main character in the video grew up in Oslo and was musing that it didn’t seem very special.
In the campaign, the main character pointed out that Oslo didn’t have the same grandeur, long lines, or hustle and bustle of a big city, citing that “everything is so available” and that Oslo feels like a village compared to bigger cities like New York or Paris. The ultimate question presented was, “Is it even a city?”
However, the power of the campaign was its ability to position these doubts as Oslo’s greatest strength. The commercial ends by saying visiting a city should feel a little hard to get and that “it isn’t supposed to be easy”. This campaign spoke to potential visitors who might prefer the tranquility and availability of a charming city over big-name tourist destinations.
Iceland promoted the value of visiting the country through the winter “Looks Like You Need Iceland” campaign. In selling the unique destination, Iceland created content during the winter that highlighted the joy of a trip to the country and the potential to overcome the hardship and monotony of day-to-day life.
The campaign asked viewers targeted questions, like whether they’ve had enough of waking up to bad news, doing endless video calls, or not making new friends. It positioned these questions next to the beautiful imagery of the country, highlighting to viewers that they could benefit from Iceland.
The campaign emotionally resonated with viewers who can relate to all of those sentiments and likely have had enough of the mundane aspects of their routine and are seeking adventure. It spotlighted the joy of visiting Iceland, panning through picturesque scenery like hot springs, beautiful glacier walls, stunning waterfalls, and more, driving interested visitors.
It’s important that any marketing campaign or brand story designed to reach out to consumers is paired with strategies to optimize campaigns for reeling those customers in. Brand awareness and lead generation are two outreach strategies that work side-by-side to build relationships with visitors.
Building brand awareness is where storytelling is really valuable, using powerful narratives to make potential consumers aware of your brand. Meanwhile, lead generation is geared toward taking the consumers who are aware of your brand and pulling them across the finish line for a meaningful interaction, whether that means a phone call, reservation, or a booked trip. Lead generation is the final filter in the funnel, redirecting interested consumers to take action.
Metrics like engagement rates and bookings help track success so you can understand how your efforts are translating into tangible lead generation. While optimizing your campaigns, you should utilize metrics like:
Understanding the effects of these metrics will allow you to make adjustments as needed. If the metrics don’t demonstrate the success you were hoping for, it may be a sign that you may need to go back to the drawing board.
Travel and experience brands are in a unique position to use the experiences they offer and translate them into meaningful stories that drive engagement and growth. Experience brands can create compelling narratives using tools like storytelling, audience understanding, and strategic execution
At PETERMAYER, turning joyful experiences into growth is our specialty. We help brands access the joy within their experiences, pinpoint their unique value offerings, and creatively communicate these ideas with their consumers. Using the unique insights we cook up in our Brand Joy Lab combined with market data, we support brands in building strong campaigns that are likely to resonate with their target audience.
Start crafting your brand’s unforgettable story today—because every journey deserves to be shared. Contact us to schedule a call.
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