Dangers of Brand Association

Brand association has a long track record of being valued by corporations. By getting star athletes to wear their shoes Nike inspires countless billions of dollars in revenue. Some become so enamored with the brand that they become walking billboards for the company (note ankle tattoo at right).

Brand Association is why countries compete to win the right to host Olympic Games – to associate their country with champions and great performances and garner worldwide attention – if even for a short while.

This morning I received an invitation to participate in a marketing promotion with the largest junk food retailer in Canada. The Canadian Tourism Commission has worked very hard at creating an award-winning campaign called Locals Know in 2009. For 2010, they are partnering with the potato chip company for a promotion called Chip Trips?

Why does a potato chip company want to partner with the CTC?

to enhance the reputation of their brand – note the healthy, active lifestyles being demonstrated in the video – all with a bag of chips in hand.
to associate the junk food brand with Canadian Tourism experiences and great Canadian Tourism experience providers.
Most importantly – to grow sales of potato chips!

Why does the CTC want to partner with a potato chip company?

They don’t have any money to market tourism experiences in Canada and have to partner in order to gain exposure.

What is the danger of associating my brand with the largest potato chip company in Canada?

Northern Edge Algonquin (my company) and other businesses that build their reputation on wellness, healthy local food, and sustainability risk doing harm to their brand by promoting thier experiences within this campaign. Associating our brand with unhealthy food will taint the perception of our brand, the type of food and experiences we provide our guests – despite the wholesome video commercials that the chip company my choose to run.

As a result, we will not benefit from the massive spend by the chip company, promoting Canada’s domestic travel experiences.

Underfunding of Tourism in Canada

I find it disappointing and disheartening that the National tourism promotion agency – the Canadian Tourism Commission is forced to partner with big business in order to generate interest in domestic tourism because they don’t have a budget that allows them to market tourism with a reasonable level of federal funding.

Especially at this time in global history, when a global climate change treaty is being negotiated in Copenhagen, and when Canada is set to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, this is the wrong time for the CTC to tie it’s brand to something less than glorious.

Sustainable and responsible tourism, local tourism experiences offer the most vital opportunities to grow regional tourism in Canada’s small towns and communities. Give us an opportunity to promote the right kind of tourism experiences, those that enrich local communities and reward responsible practices.

Unfortunately, the only tourism businesses that stand to gain from such a marketing campaign as Chip Trips are those that cater to the mass market. You’ll undoubtedly be seeing lots more two for one special offers to attend Canada’s Wonderland, Ontario Place and Niagara Falls this summer, but you’ll be eating a lot of chips along the way.

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Tagged as: brand, chip trips, CTC, Marketing, tourism

Celes Davar

Thanks Todd for raising this issue. I, too, was taken aback by this domestic marketing program and did not quite know how to respond. So, after thinking about it, I decided to write a note to the Canadian Tourism Commission about this marketing initiative. I have put a few extracts from that note below:

"While I appreciate the remarkable innovativeness of the CTC team to constantly try new things, do amazing things with limited resources, and seek relationships with new partners, three things concern me about this specific marketing initiative (in contrast to the innovative Locals Know marketing initiative, which it would have been great to see extended into the new year):

1. There is a disconnect between this marketing initiative (alliance with this specific corporate partner for a marketing program) and the goals that we are trying to reach regarding sustainability within tourism in Canada. Books and video and conferences about the impacts of the fast food industry, junk food, and costs to human health are at record sales. More important, there is a deeper concern about the insidious nature with which large food corporations may be co-opting the locavore movement. See research to credible articles below.
2. Our focus on developing tourism programs in which we are helping Canadian tourism operators to buy local, support local producers, and support organic foods is put at risk when our national tourism marketing body engages in a marketing program with a very large, influential junk food retailer.
3. Brand association should be put through a filter that resonates with the core values of sustainable tourism. Was this brand association initiative put through any kind of filter? Does one exist?

As a tourism industry trainer, I cannot be an advocate for this marketing initiative when it runs counter-current to everything we teach in our tourism training programs.

As a tourism industry operator in Manitoba co-facilitating the development of six new itineraries to be launched as part of RVC 2010 (A CTC premiere annual initiative for the international market), we have developed criteria to ensure that the tourism industry partners in each of the six pre-conference experiences will focus on presenting local foods, local food partners, local recipes, and good nutrition associated with quality preparation of foods. We are trying to establish a new benchmark for what the Canadian tourism industry can and should be providing in terms of better quality foods within our tourism experiences – foods and food preparation that reflect key global principles of sustainability.

I just participated at the TIAC (Tourism Industry Association of Canada) conference in Saint John, in which TIAC focused a half-day session on discussing draft criteria regarding Sustainability within the tourism industry. In the draft global sustainable tourism criteria which we reviewed, Section D.1.1., it reads, “Purchasing policy favours environmentally friendly products for building materials, capital goods, food and consumables.” I don’t believe that this initiative is consistent with the national TIAC sustainable tourism criteria that are being proposed for the tourism industry.

I did a bit of research online to try to get some perspectives about Frito-Lay. Here are a few links to broaden and deepen the discussion about this. I think that we have some good reasons to be concerned about this marketing alliance of the CTC with Frito-Lay, a large North American and International division associated with PepsiCo.

Lay’s the locavore’s junk food?
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-0513-lays-loc...

Greenwashing Alert: Frito-Lay Co-Opts Local Food Movement, and More On the Way
http://www.chelseagreen.com/content/greenwashin...
This is a particularly good review. According to the NY Times, Frito-Lay uses 2 Billion bounds of potatoes each year, relying on just 80 farms to provide these potatoes. That means 25 million pounds of potatoes per farm. These are large farms, industrial farms. This link provides a direct link to the NY Times article.

I am not challenging the notion of finding good corporate partners with whom to launch innovative marketing initiatives. We need this kind of innovative collaboration and unique thinking that we are proud of, from all of our team at the CTC. I am questioning this initiative with Frito-Lay, and critiquing this because there is not, in my opinion, a good and endurable fit with Canada’s move to sustainability within the tourism industry. We need a good filter, however, to select good corporate partners who demonstrate a strong commitment to a low carbon economy, and a vision for sustainability.

I am also looking for consistency between the tourism training that we are doing in Canada to help operators make a business case for sustainability within their own operations, and having a fit with the marketing programs that our DMO’s and the CTC are doing. This marketing initiative, in my view, is out of synch with what our customers and many of our industry partners expect from a national “discover Canada” travel marketing program corporate partner."
-Celes Davar to Canadian Tourism Commission staff

Thanks again Todd, for raising important issues and for being able to frame them in a way that causes all of us to step back and reflect on what is taking place.

Dangers of Brand Association

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