The Wisconsin Department of Tourism announced that in 2010, Wisconsin tourism generated $12.3 billion in revenue.
This is a story of how one Midwest city took advantage of this profit center to grab its slice of the tourism pie.
Learning To See Again
Before I was able to help the town of Osceola rebrand itself and become this:
I need to reintroduce them to what was “hiding in plain sight.”
So in 2010, I was asked to help brand the village of Osceola, the third city or downtown we were commissioned to brand to help it become a destination worth visiting.
Part of our exercise was to visually capture details of the city that we knew the city of Osceola took for granted.
Part of our exercise was to visually capture details of the city that we knew the citizens of Osceola took for granted.
Here are some examples showing our “visual audit” of this lovely community.
Only after seeing what assets Osceola had could we begin to carve out a voice that would stand out and have meaning for this lovely community.
And for their annual celebration attracting well over 10,000 visitors, we created this poster bringing together the two worlds of wheels and wings (vintage automobiles and airplanes).
Note that this vintage hood ornament married two aspects of this event: as an airplane with clouds which was actually a hood ornament reflected in the shiny hood of this classic car.
The result attracted almost double their attendance in previous years.
How Can You Brand What You Can’t See?
These are shown here to see what this lovely city had taken for granted.
They’d forgotten some of the gems they lived with every day.
This is truly the lesson here:
You must never (and can’t afford) to forget your audience’s view of the world.
Yet, when the committee assigned to this project viewed these, their eyes were reborn to see now what they were sitting on.
Is your city keeping its hidden gems buried out of view? I can think of 12.3 billion reasons why you should explore this.
Happy branding.