The Right Community For The Right Idea!
I just found this example of a simple and good idea in the BrainStore archives and wanted to share it with our blog readers.
A few years ago, the British Tourist Authority in Zürich asked BrainStore to come up with ideas on how to attract more families to London or England in general.
As usual, we set up a community to come to an Idea Event and to think about this task. When setting up the community, we decided to invite teens, who have a great deal of influence on their families, and the editors of school newspapers (today it would of course be school blogs), who are always interested in reaching their target audience.
The community came together with the task to come up with a fun campaign that can be put into school newspapers as an advertisment.
After reflecting about some clichés around Britain (mind this was a few years ago) which evolved around rain and the quality of food, and after looking at the way other tourist destinations advertise their benefits (usually: very very blue sky) the team was asked to come up with more concrete ideas.
One of the ideas was to create a series of fun postcards, showing Big Ben and a colored sky with unusual objects (pigs, rubber ducks, golden suns etc). The message: We Britains do not need to show blue sky, because we have so much more to offer and that’s way more cool than anything you can experience in any other destination with your family.
The series of postcards was distributed to school newspapers, and the editors created a full page advertisement with the above message, glueing one postcard of the series of four into every paper.
Soon, word spread among teens everywhere in Switzerland that England is a cool destination, and they started to talk their parents into visiting London or England.
What is important about this process is the inclusion of two important groups: teens as influencers for their parents, and editors of school newspapers as credible peers for this audience.
