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Writer's pictureAnne Ricci

Attention, relevance and the importance of brand building. Key takeaways from the Mumbrella Travel Marketing Summit 2024

Travel is a personal passion and an industry in which I want to learn and work more.  So, I bundled myself off to the Mumbrella Travel Marketing Summit in Sydney this week.


Not only did I dive deeper into the Travel Marketing world, but I noted some common themes that occur no matter the industry I am working in:

  • The Attention Economy and standing out in a sea of sameness and proliferation

  • The challenge of targeting Generation Z in a relevant way and why nostalgia is so hot right now

  • The subtle art of balancing long-term Brand & Performance


 

My two highlights of the summit

 

Firstly, Cam Blackley & Emily Taylor from the Bureau of Everything shared their top tips to make your brand as unmissable as the world it lives in:

  1. Quit seeing your brand competition as the fight.  Your consumer’s attention is the fight, and the real competition is the other messages in their feeds and media.

  2. Behave like a brand in crisis (even if you are not).  Find the drama and tension in your business and brand challenges as they open the doors to doing something differently and taking risks.  Cam & Emily talked about Old Spice’s famous Smell Like a Man campaign as a reaction to imminent delisting and sale or Lego’s return to double down on bricks, resulting in the Lego Movie after over-diversification drove them to near financial ruin.  Natalie Placko, the CMO from Intrepid, backed this up when she told us how the organisation came to see the value in building Brand over Performance after a near wipe-out during the pandemic.  

  3. Don’t underestimate the power of a weakness.  Turning a perceived weakness into a point of distinction can create something unmissable.  They referenced Tasmania’s cold climate off-season, which led to the award-winning Come Down for Air campaign, or Tinder, who doubled down on the ‘swipe’ and reframed the negative connotation into a positive benefit with their One Nightstand work.

  4. Be creative with brand codes.  In a sea of sameness and campaigns full of tropes, find ways to create codes and characters that stand out and drive recognition.  In this example, Cam & Emily referenced their work for Tourism Australia when they turned a well-worn but recognisable trope for Australia into a distinctive and likeable character and brand code in the form of Rosie the Kangaroo.

 

Secondly, hearing from Maria Parisi and Jayesh Kesry from Contiki.  They shared their unique and thought-provoking take on Gen Z’s needs and motivations and how they keep up with youth culture.

 

Their key message for the audience is that, too often, marketing speaks to a caricature instead of the real Gen Z.  And for a generation that is frequently typecast as extreme, they are much more balanced in their approach to life than we think.  Getting all purposeful and woke on Gen Z won’t cut it.  They are seeking brands that help them achieve that balance between what is right and what they enjoy.



 Brands like Riser Seltzers – alcoholic hard seltzers with hints of turmeric, acai and spirulina or Depop, Gen Z’s go-to site to recycle clothing and save or make $ to spend on fun experiences.


 

For Contiki, think Run Club tours, where you travel to countries and run in the craziest places with like-minded travellers, or sober travel experiences for those who prefer exploration and culture over partying.

 

However, the new insight for me was Gen Z’s take on nostalgia.  My teenagers wear clothes I got around in the 90s, and Contiki’s research on motivators behind this was a fresh and new insight I hadn’t heard before.  Contiki’s research found there is a real lack of brands that speak to them and posed the questions “Are Gen Z romanticising the past because they can’t relate to the brands of today?” and “Is Nostalgia a denial of the painful present?”



This is a generation who lost formative years to the pandemic, are not just concerned but traumatised about climate change and are actually quite sensible, preferring sober experiences over the partying of decades gone by.  And these experiences are impacting the brands they choose to relate to.

 

This a-ha moment really got me thinking about Gen Z’s motivations and tensions.  With insights like these, I can see how Contiki are surging ahead with this generation by speaking in a voice that gets them and tailoring their offer to meet their balanced needs.  If not now, when?

 

Mumbrella, thanks for another insightful event that hit on all the relevant issues we are tackling as brand owners and partners.

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