Set the bar honestly and it can be cleared with ease. Create unrealistic expectations however, and prepare to see people left disappointed.
Edith Piaf allegedly had a simple piece of advice for anyone wanting to become famous. “Use your faults, use your defects,” she is meant to have said, “then you’ll become a star.” The quote was itself made famous by Grace Jones (who of course magnificently covered Piaf’s La Vie en Rose). Jones herself has an idiosyncratic voice yet became a massive selling recording artist, as well as an iconic fashion model despite a somewhat androgynous physique and asymmetric gaze. Piaf’s statement ultimately boils down to the idea that not only should obstacles not be barriers to success, but that those obstacles can actually be used as tools to beget success. Be exactly who and what you are, and make the most of what you’ve got, in other words.
At the risk of making the most cliched, LinkedIn segue ever used on these pages, Piaf’s words often spring to mind during our investment and travel promotion work. Everything has to be perfect, faults and defects hidden from sight or conveniently ignored. There is never any room for what’s real, what makes a place unique. Faults and defects are airbrushed, because only the very best will do.
It’s a very slippery slope to follow, because perceived perfection demands actual perfection. Promise an investor, or a traveller, the perfect, most seamless experience and anything less is likely to lead to disappointment. Of course, some places can trade on perfection, because by and large they deliver. One of the greatest ads for a destination we have ever come across features two men carrying a rock long distances to place conveniently in a stream so that hikers need not get their feet wet. Arguably, only Switzerland could get away with that, because its entire brand is built around perfection (albeit one which breaks down at Geneva Airport on any given Saturday morning during the ski season). Almost any other country trying to pull off something similar would look, quite frankly, ridiculous.
Even in Switzerland’s case, however, that quest for perfection is sold as a lovable quirk. Not a fault, not a defect, perhaps, but the ad’s undercurrent is one of admission that the Swiss Alps are not perfect. Instead, we’re making the best of what we have.
The trouble for other destinations is that none of them are Switzerland, and they know it. So they pretend to be what they are not. Browse any number of investment promotion pitches or watch destination ads and it won’t be long before you realise that they are all very much the same, trying to get across much the same message. We offer a young, skilled, multi-lingual workforce, a strategic location at the crossroads of somewhere and somewhere else, our costs are competitive, our government is business-friendly. It all sounds great, but it all sounds identical to what the country next door is offering. Perfection, it turns out, very quickly starts to look a bit too perfect, a bit too generic. By ignoring every fault and every defect, destinations risk doing away with precisely what might have made a place stick in the mind.
Don’t apologise
A brave few have tried the opposite. In 2018 the Nebraska Tourism Commission, having found that its state ranked last among fellow Americans as somewhere worth visiting, dropped its Nebraska Nice slogan and went with Honestly, it’s not for everyone. Billboards proclaimed the merits of the state’s ‘flat, boring landscape’, and visitors liked the message. Nebraska climbed from 50th to a tie for 41st in travellers’ preferences, and John Ricks, the commission’s director, credited it with several years of record spending by tourists. (The slogan was eventually retired in 2024, after the governor decided it drew too much attention to the state’s absence of mountains. More on that hereafter).
Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, arguably went even further. That same year Go Vilnius, the city’s development agency, faced a problem familiar to anyone selling the eastern half of Europe, namely that few people could find the place on a map. Indeed, fewer than one in ten of the city’s target audience in Berlin and London even knew that Vilnius existed. So, rather than pretend otherwise, it decided to make the most of this particular fault and began billing itself as ‘the G-spot of Europe’: nobody knows where it is, but when you find it, it’s amazing. Predictably, the local Catholic Church was appalled, which, as is so often the case, helped things a great deal. Visitor numbers went up by around 12 per cent and the campaign won numerous awards. What’s more, Go Vilnius found that visitors’ first impressions of Vilnius almost always beat their expectations. And that is what gives the game away: set the bar honestly and it can be cleared with ease. Create unrealistic expectations however, and prepare to see people bitterly disappointed.
For destinations looking for investors, the same logic applies, arguably even more so. A traveller sold on a promise of perfect weather might be able to move beyond a wet afternoon with nary more than a shrug. An investor sold on a perfect labour market, a seamless permitting process, low taxes, good incentives, and world-class logistics commits serious capital well beyond the price of a flight and hotel and will expect precisely what was in the brochure. This is when the investment promotion agency that is honest (one that is prepared to admit that although the talent is there it might have to be trained, or that while infrastructure is improving there is still a fair way to go, for example) is not weakening its pitch but rather bolstering what is perhaps the only assets that survive an investor’s contact with the real world, which are honesty and credibility.
None of which makes self-deprecation and/or an admission of faults and defects a sure bet. It is an incredibly narrow tightrope, and Nebraska’s ditching of its Not for everyone campaign shows just how easy it is to slip when what reads as irreverent, clever wit to one audience reads as an admission of dullness to a governor with an election to win. Laugh at your faults in the wrong way and you risk looking a tad amateurish. Instead, remember that what Edith Piaf and Grace Jones managed to grasp but most investment and tourism pitches fail to, is that using faults and defects is not the same as apologising for them.
Photo: Dreamstime.