Why Your Stories Matter

"Great sightseeing experiences provide more than just entertainment. They have the power to change how we think and feel about the world around us."

We've been working with leading sightseeing companies around the world, helping sightseeing operators attract new customers by making people feel like they belong, creating fun and entertaining audio tours and passenger experiences that connect travelers to the world around them.

What we’ve discovered being a part of sightseeing projects that involve cities, destinations, and quite often – regions, is that through a story, sightseeing companies are creating shared experiences that ignite the imagination and inspire the human spirit in ways that were simply not possible - until now. 

So why is this important? Let’s look at stories for a moment to better understand their impact in our lives and in our work.

Stories, or story comes from the latin historia or history. It’s defined as an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment or an account of past events and experiences.

Stories are also the narratives, myths, folklore and legends that create powerful connections between organizations and their customers. 

Great stories are true and trusted, they appeal to our senses, are entertaining, educational, emotional, intellectual, inspiring – fascinating. Stories elicit certain feelings, perceptions and reactions and they can ignite our imaginations.

For the same reason some film makers invest millions of dollars to tell their version of a story to captivate audiences in cinemas around the globe, sightseeing companies have the opportunity to share fun and enriching stories to attract audiences of tourists and travelers. It's these stories that provide powerful links to shared experiences, how we look at life, how we fit in and fit together. This is because great stories are based on truth, are compelling, appealing — and memorable.

 

Stories are how we get to know the world and our experience in it. It’s how we make connections and remember things. Stories provide a satisfying and complete experience. Through stories, we escape from our own worlds, drifting into new landscapes, new ideas, and new destinations, bringing new meaning in our lives, where we can experience a sense of accomplishment through learning and collective experiences.

 

How many times have you shared a great story or experience?

 

What's your Story?  

 

We’re talking about the goal of every marketer, to create a product or experience that makes people feel compelled to talk about it, recommend it. It’s about telling a story about an extraordinary place, your place.

 

One of the key success factors in building growth and profits into your business is consistency. In marketing and in branding, we ask the question… How do we want to be known? How do we stand out? Be different. Be recognized? Be remembered?

 

In sightseeing, when there is no differentiation between companies selling similar sightseeing experiences, these organizations face commoditization of products and services, making it difficult to create sustainable competitive differentiation.

 

With easy global access to online choices and opinions, it’s more important than ever to draw positive attention from customers rather than the alternative – to be a part of the undifferentiated mass of companies that don’t stand out.

 

Let us give you an example. Recently, we visited one of North America’s top destinations where we conducted research on three land-based sightseeing companies competing for market share. Here is what we found… all three sightseeing companies were marketing two hour city sightseeing tours on luxury, air-conditioned, motor coaches. All three companies competed at the same price point. And all three companies highlighted the many of the same Points of Interest ("POI") along their routes. So, where’s the differentiation in the customers mind?

 

What does this mean? For some companies, competitive pressure creates greater market paralysis. Change is risky, particularly when it involves changing old and familiar patterns of behaviour. Without innovation or differentiation, there is only one logical response for consumers. When good is good enough, consumers will choose the cheapest option. Forced to compete on price, sightseeing operators are forced into a low-margin business. And a low margin business is not where you want to be.

 

So how does one of these companies take a leadership position in their market? Wreak havoc for their competitors? And grow their market share?

 

Differentiate themselves. In today’s highly competitive markets, the only way to stand out is to add remarkable, distinguishable, and measureable value for your customers.

 

Great stories promise something. In sightseeing, your story may promise fun and entertainment. When you don’t deliver on this promise to your customers, you lose credibility and trust. The most successful sightseeing operators work hard to craft and support their stories over time, delivering on their promise while appealing to our senses. They also understand that prosperity is created by making their customers feel like they made the right choice.

 

Travelers Want Entertainment and Cultural Enrichment

 

It’s our stories that unite us all in a common purpose and connect us with the people who interact with us. If brands are experiences, then the stories we tell are the coherent, meaningful narratives of who we are and how we fit into the world, and into the worldview of our customers. By understanding your audience and learning what stories your customers respond to, we can really be sharing something that matters.

 

According to a survey by the U.S. Tour Operators Association, USTOA members cited that travelers want enhanced experiences, cultural enrichment, and in-depth discoveries. Travelers are telling tour operators they want value for their money.

So what’s your story? When visitors step onto your bus, or your trolley, train or boat what do you want to say? What’s your script? What’s the story you want to share?

It’s at this moment in time that you have the opportunity to unify your brand experience, to provide shared experiences that unite your customers in discovery.

So why is it important to tell your story? Because you will have the opportunity to introduce yourself, and your destination, to thousands, to hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. It offers your customers the opportunity to step onto your bus or your boat to escape, to leave this time to travel to another time and place, to connect with the people, places and events that have shaped your unique destination, its culture and its history. Like watching a great movie, we allow ourselves to be taken to a different place, leaving the cinema or our living rooms to become a part a compelling story.

 

"Deliver a great experience and people will talk."

 

In Joseph Pine’s and James Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy, they write “Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience.”

The bottom line is – your stories matter. More important than any technology, software platform, or device that you may be considering, your stories are the experience – and the experience is what will differentiate your business from becoming a “me-too” tourism commodity.

Travelers are looking for a deeper meaning. The changing trends of consumers shows that consumers crave authentic experiences, experiences that appeal to our senses, are meaningful, emotional, and intellectual. So what you have is an incredible opportunity to transform your business by reintroducing yourself to the world. By sharing your cultural history, your passengers can escape, imagine, explore, connect to and be a part of your story.

By providing high-quality and consistent sightseeing experiences for domestic and international foreign language markets, your brand will be transformed, will be respected, and will be something that is remembered… and shared… through languages, cultures, friends and families.

By rewriting your script, by telling great stories, you have the opportunity to rewrite, to retell, to reintroduce your business to the world. You have the opportunity to topple language barriers, reduce costs and in the process, provide the truthfulness… and authenticity… to dig beneath the surface… of sights and sounds… to share collective experiences… to bring people closer to… an extraordinary destination – your destination… to inspire… connect… to bring vibrantly to life the sites and sightseeing.

Seek to inspire people. The opportunity to entertain and educate your audiences from around the world by providing relevant, authentic experiences and your business will be strengthened by being the one that is vividly remembered… and shared… because it’s the time and the place that people remember… and their connection to it… so the opportunity… is all the greater.

 

Your Consistency is Key to Growth

By providing memorable visitor experiences consistently, you’ll unlock a key success factor that will fuel your growth. If you want to do anything well you must be consistent in your efforts. When you ask yourself – what is the best experience we can deliver – the answer should be “It’s the experience that we can deliver consistently.”

Another key success factor is your ROA, or Return on Assets. ROA gives you an idea on how your assets are being used to generate earnings. When your bus or boat departs half full, you can’t recoup revenue from this perishable inventory – those empty seats are just that – empty. When a dedicated bus of 20 Germans leaves on a tour with a German tour guide, how much revenue is left behind?

 

By servicing domestic and key foreign language markets on the same bus, everyone gets to experience the same tour at the same time in their own language. You can capitalize on attracting new customers and convert your investments into more profit.

 

For more information please contact us now by filling in our online form - Contact AudioConexus. You can also reach us at 905-492-1300.