Top three tips for branding a region

Capturing the essence of a region, the experiences it offers and the communities that make it special is no easy feat.

While there’s a variety of ways you can approach the task, we have three guiding principles we use to make sure the brand we create most effectively serves the audiences we’re targeting.

1. Understand the audiences to understand the role of the brand

There’s lots of ways to brand a place or region. And many times, one place will use several brands to serve different audiences. Before kicking off any branding exercise, it's important to figure out the type of brand that will best serve the audiences you are trying to reach. 

Council or LGA Brands

A council or LGA brand should encapsulate the ‘live, work and invest’ messaging for a city or region. Focused on serving the local community, the brand needs to deliver important information around essential services, as well as support and develop the local economy. 

These brands are built to focus on ‘livability’ over ‘visitability’, and engage in activities to inform, educate, serve and activate residents and businesses. They need a strategy and identity that clearly show the organisation’s ability to keep the region running, and growing, smoothly and sustainably. 

Placebrands

A placebrand can be council-funded, but is often owned and activated by multiple stakeholders.

Usually aspirational in tone, these brands show why a particular region is a great place to live, work, play and visit. They are often needed because the council brand is really focused on ‘delivering today’ for an ‘internal’ - meaning local - audience; whereas a placebrand helps attract external audiences to become part of the future vision for the community. 

They differ from destination brands because they still prioritise the longer term growth of the region through settling new residents, businesses and investors.

Destination Brands

Focused on representing the value of the region as a tourism destination, these brands exist to grow the visitor economy. They are generally separate to a ‘live and work’ proposition. 

A destination brand will often be a ‘collective brand’, sitting above, or drawing in, a range of other tourism brands and experiences. Where destination brands can go wrong is in deprioritising the local community in favour of visitors. More on that below…

By deciding which of the above categories best suits the audience you are trying to serve with the new brand, you can start the development process with clearer goals in mind.

2. Think community first

No matter what sort of brand you are creating for a region, the local community is the place to start. After all, your brand either exists to serve them, or relies on them to make your region great for potential new residents, investors and visitors. 

Destination brands can fall too easily into the habit of centreing the needs of visitors, without consulting locals on what the brand might solve for them. And that’s a trend we are changing.

‘Boosting the visitor economy’ is a great goal that will benefit locals. But it’s also somewhat vague, and feels like it won’t help everyone (at least not straight away). After all, not everyone works in tourism, hospitality or retail.

It’s better to go a step further than the economic goals alone, and look at the ways you can activate your brand to provide genuine benefit to your community.

Here’s just a few ways you could make your brand useful for the community:

• Invest in local businesses through social media grants

• Create opportunities for locals to better experience ‘their own backyard’

• Create itineraries that feature community-led experiences and local businesses

• Prioritise the rollout of brand assets that the community wants to see - e.g. signage or maps

• Share First Nations histories of the area, with the permission and guidance of elders

• Challenge negative ideas others may have about the region by sharing the stories of proud locals and community groups

This list could go on and on, but you can see some examples of how we’ve done it with Discover Northern Grampians and Shepparton & Goulburn Valley.

The best way to build on this list is to ask the residents, business owners and community groups that are passionate about the region what they can gain from the destination brand!

3. Find the intersection of authentic, distinctive and compelling

By working closely with your stakeholders, identify the brand truths that lie at the heart of your region.

Authentic

Talk truthfully about your region. If there’s controversy or misrepresentation out there - address it. Celebrate what is truly great about the area, its experiences and its people. Think about how your brand will address aspects of the region that are still developing or that might challenge your audiences.

Distinctive

Uncover what is unique to your region - what do you have that no one else does? What do you do better than anywhere else? In regional branding in particular, it can be easy to default to a nature-based proposition, or a focus on ‘easygoing, relaxed and welcoming’. This may be true of your region, but it’s hardly distinctive. What are the unique, exciting, inspiring aspects that really set you apart? Hint: they may be so much a part of your history and community that you don’t realise how compelling they are to people outside of the region. That was the case for Shepparton & Goulburn Valley.

Compelling

Think about what your audiences want and need, and align your messaging to directly respond to this. You can be authentic and distinctive, but if nobody really wants what you are ‘selling’ then those two factors become irrelevant. Do the work to understand what will drive your audiences to act - and develop audience profiles for your brand based on the needs and wants your brand can truly address. Demographics are pointless if they don’t help us understand what makes a person tick!

The key is that each of these components alone will not be enough to build a powerful brand story. But by finding where they intersect, you can create messaging, strategy and a visual identity that is truly ownable and actionable for your region. 

If you’d like support to build an effective brand for your region, we’d love to help.