DESTINATION Door County

Situation

After undergoing a rebrand, Destination Door County was ready to activate its new brand with unique creative assets and marketing tactics, launching campaigns to promote its core strategic pillars: values-based marketing, destination alignment, and sustainability. Madden developed the “Feelings” campaign and provided additional destination marketing support to execute this strategy.

Approach

Destination Door County wanted to promote the different leisure experiences the destination offers while focusing on travel intents. Madden developed the “Feelings” campaign to create an emotional bond with the DMO’s target audience. The campaign not only promoted the experiences travelers could have, but also the feelings those experiences instilled in visitors.

Ad units were refreshed seasonally and focused on leisure, while also segmenting to meetings and conventions and workforce recruitment. We launched a variety of digital media tactics with a targeting strategy focused on immediate drive markets given the destination’s lack of a nearby airport. Leveraging insights from visitation data, we focused on Green Bay, Appleton, Minneapolis, and Madison, while also experimenting with opportunity markets (St. Louis and Denver).

Given the recent volatility of the tourism industry, Destination Door County prioritized partner relations following its rebrand. The DMO wanted community partners in its 19 different tourism zones to understand how Destination Door County was promoting the destination and its objectives. These challenges varied, some partners were combating overtourism, while others wanted to persuade more visitation to their specific area, and Destination Door County set out to address them all.

Madden helped Destination Door County increase brand sentiment with its residents and partners by promoting the DMO locally and developing marketing collateral to aid Destination Door County’s communication with partners, such as a newsletter, annual meeting video, and promotional video for National Travel and Tourism Week. A major destination alignment element of our campaign was the “Art in the Door” initiative to support the local art community and ensure community voices were part of the campaign. We invited locals to submit original 2D artwork based on the selected feelings that Door County inspires. Four winners were selected through a public vote, and their work will be incorporated into Door County marketing campaigns.

Destination Door County recognized the need to protect and preserve its valuable, fragile natural assets. Our team launched geofencing media to promote sustainability messages in-destination. Additionally, in order to evaluate overall growth across sustainability initiatives, our data science team developed a Sustainability Index. The index measures performance of efforts and impacts specifically related to sustainability messaging and initiatives executed by the DMO. Through this type of measurement, not only is Destination Door County able to track performance, but this index provides an opportunity to offer transparency and accountability to its residents and stakeholders.

Results