Content Marketing Today

Design Driven Content Marketing Makes It Better Again in the Bahamas

You might not know that until recently tourism had been declining significantly in the Bahamas. For a country that derives 60% of its GDP from tourism, that was a disastrous trend.

With the help of branding gurus, Duffy & Partners, the Bahamas has reversed its tourism slide. The company took a hard look at the marketing campaigns that they and their competitive destinations were conducting.

What stood out was that nothing stood out. 

Everything looked pretty much the same. Even though the Bahamas were outspending their competitors, the results were clearly disappointing.  The lack of a comprehensive branding and marketing campaign led to a disappointing ROI on all the money being spent.

The challenge then was obvious: how to reinvent the Bahamas as a unique and compelling destination that would lure tourists back again and again thus reversing the slide in visitors.

Duffy & Partners came up with a simple to say but hard to execute strategy: “Create branded desire for the Bahamas.  Differentiate the nation as the preferred the sun and sand a vacation destination.”

They used brilliant design and ultimately great content to create a memorable proprietary brand identity and architecture. As they put it,

“The identity system highlights each of the 14 major tourist destinations and their unique offerings.  It provides the means for each destination in the Bahamas to fly its own flag yet still be part of a larger whole representing the diversity of vacation experiences available to tourists across the Bahamas.”

What took a lot of words to say is actually communicated instantaneously with the graphical representation of the island chain, it uses unique shapes and colors to represent each of those 14 destinations.  Numerous creative iterations of this design pervade every piece of marketing from the Bahamas–even gift bags.

This powerful visual metaphor underlies terrific content on the Bahamas website. There you can easily plan a custom trip to the Bahamas guided by those very same visual elements that represent the major island destinations.

There is a one surprising but critical content component on which Duffy & Partners focused: when they launched the new identity they created a brand book for the Bahamian people, because they realized that local citizens needed to buy in to the importance of the effort end of tourism to the Bahamas.  Effectively, this is an in person content marketing strategy because without a positive person to person experience, tourists will leave disappointed, never to return.

Summing it all up

After a final 6% slide in 2002, tourism has been growing ever since with a significant increase in both air and sea arrivals.  These results were possible only because Duffy & Partners took the time to fully understand what gave the Bahamas the potential to become a uniquely appealing destination.  Only after gaining his understanding were they able to create the powerful and unique branding campaign but is now delivering a measurable ROI.

For the Bahamas, great design dramatically strengthened the power of content marketing.  Visual island metaphors on the website, for example, reinforce the brand and become real as they enable each visitor to create their own customized vacation. That’s very powerful stuff.

Learn more about Duffy & Partners from our recent article.