Applying the brand manifold to Salvadoran tourism
This week, without the benefit of a case for which we could provide our very best ex post rationalizations and critiques, I’ve decided to take a different approach. When I spent roughly a year in El Salvadoran working alongside the US government and the Interamerican Development Bank to develop a regional tourism development strategy for northwest El Salvador, I recognized that my task was perhaps less about gimmicks, promotions, and the mass marketing for which they had initially contracted me and more about defining a brand. While the article on brand architecture was interesting, it felt less immediately relevant than that on brand manifold; as a potentially compelling exercise, I’ve decided to apply the brand manifold framework to analyze my own previous professional experience.
To provide a little bit of color and context for the underlying theory: brand manifold refers to the multidimensionality of brands in terms of both time and constituencies - at its core, this means that brands are dynamic and evolve over time, and brands are the aggregation and approximation of many different stakeholders’ own perceptions (termed “embodied value”).
The challenge I faced in El Salvador was not that no brand existed - they had worked with the Ministry of Tourism to create the Ruta Fresca, loosely “Fresh Air Trail”, prior to my arrival - but that the community leaders and regional tourism authorities were wed to the antiquated idea that advertising was the lynchpin of any successful strategy moving forward. What follows is an assessment of the Ruta Fresca brand, based on various benchmarks referenced in this week’s reading:
Brand communications: moderate. There was an intense focus on advertising and promotions through newspapers, television media, and radio; however, this was guided by serious marketing myopia - narrow definitions of business based on what specific services the association provided. The quality of external communications often lacked professionalism as much as tailoring to desired segments, and for months it appeared that internal communications were themselves not terribly cogent regarding the vision for their brand.
Brand embodiments: moderate. Those that opted to visit the Ruta Fresca often handily enjoyed their experience, while other segments complained that they weren’t sure else what there was to do. Customer service was fairly high, which led to a sense that expectations (including those developed by brand communications) were met or exceeded upon visiting.
Brand equity, financial: weak. With many tourism operators treating their hotels and inns more as part-time hobbies than real work, occupancy rates and resultant cash flows for each business were low. Thus, if you were to sell all the assets that collectively comprised the Ruta Fresca, it is likely that it would not fetch much more than the market value of the physical assets themselves.
Brand equity, behavioral: weak. As determined by surveys and interviews (formal/informal), customers did not see the Ruta Fresca brand as being something remarkable; rather, people visited different destinations within the Ruta Fresca - like El Pital Mountain - because it had an intrinsic tourism value itself and happened to be co-located within the region.
Embodied value: weak. While many leaders in the association could articulate what products and services they offered and the unique value of their own establishments, few could broadly identify what the Ruta Fresca stood for - even with, or despite, the existence of an overly inclusive, 7-line mission statement.
Exchange value, customer: medium-low. The Ruta Fresca brand, with some individual exceptions (including 2-4 higher end hotels) was fairly accessible/affordable to the average domestic (and particularly international) traveler.
Exchange value, management: medium-high. If we assume that affordability/pricing is a key lever in generating a broader base of consumers, then we can say that Ruta Fresca - with a wide variety of lodging and dining options, many of which were in fact affordable - had a competitive exchange value.
Exchange value typology: commodity-mass market. While company equity is relatively strong, customer equity is relatively weak. Compared to other tourism destinations in El Salvador - or even worse, compared to other tourism destinations throughout Central America, including neighboring Guatemala and nearby Costa Rica - the Ruta Fresca destination was not something for which most customers would pay a heavy price premium.
Brand manifold, temporal factors: moderate. In the town of La Palma, there was an incredible history involving the country’s most famous art, the recent civil war, and a strong cultural identity that could be (and often attempted to be) leveraged for the benefit of a brand identity. However, what efforts the regional tourism association had made were almost exclusively to define a static brand rather than to “reinterpret the past in terms of the future, or in a complementary manner, to interpret the future in terms of the past.”
Brand manifold, multiple constituencies: weak. The leaders and tourism operators of the Ruta Fresca had only ever conceptualized the brand as being something it was responsible for defining, curating, and communicating to consumers, but did not take an expansive view of what other organizations (including the IDB, the Ministry of Tourism, other domestic tourism destinations, investors, employees, and local residents) might believe about what the brand was or should be. Given aforementioned challenges associated with a lack of a cogent vision from management (see “Embodied value” above), this meant that the brand was fragmented and inconsistent, destining itself to its commodity-mass market position for the foreseeable future.
