Portrayal of Place through Prose and Photography - Impact on (Simultaneous) Perception

Mind your Ps and Qs (28)

“Earn and keep the trust and respect of your community, your stakeholders and your visitors”.

The identity of communities revolves around the character and culture of place that’s determined by a host of factors, including the ideas, beliefs, actions and behaviors of the local population; the history and heritage of the area; the prevailing cultural norms, landscapes, and industries; the push for “patriotic polish”; portrayal and subtle forms of deception in advertising; a range of re-development activities; and through various forms of representation or, as the case might be, misrepresentation, perhaps paradox.

Undeniably, the identities, credibility and reputations of places can become fraught with contradictions. This occurs when the politics of representation intercede and serve to continue a distortion of realities and/or are so externally-focused on attracting investments, industries or visitors that they ignore the quality-of-life of their residents and feelings of abandonment and dispossession..

All communities-as-destinations face choices when it comes to determining how they want to portray, represent and promote themselves. Though they may attempt to follow the five principles of place branding – distinctiveness, authenticity, memorability, co-creation, and place-making – the ultimate goal usually represents a form of `boosterism` that’s intentionally designed to generate quantitative throughput based somewhat, on what I would term, a mythical spin as to how to and what defines their communities-as-destinations.

While fashioning identity through place branding is obviously demand-driven, it’s unlikely to be achieved without a corresponding and complementary supply-driven mandate based on the appropriate aesthetic and authentic development and improvement of facilities, infrastructure, amenities, services and capabilities…hopefully a forthright set of actions intended to bring clarity to confusion regarding the difference in goals among various stakeholders and the intentionality of messaging associated with branding, marketing, advertising and promotion.

For communities-as-destinations, deterministic and idealized place branding is always intended to influence; convey positivity and status; and showcase resonant and high-quality experiences. But such efforts can backfire, as revealed through misuse of brand archetypes, “glamor/sham` disconnects, as in Rotterdam, or revealed through a lack of rootedness in the community.

It’s disconcerting when day-to-day experiences (particularly among residents) don’t reflect or sync with the polish of image enhancement that is selective as to who and what it includes, and deterministic of who and what it excludes (especially the nuances of different categories of places that are constantly changing). While this disconnect is often due to a lack of an overarching strategy and application of guiding principles, more disturbing is the sacrifice of merit over appearance prevalent in so many tourism-based actions, activities and developments.

Selectivity is to be expected, as it is with aspirations and ambitions, but what transpires if the equitable development of communities through tourism isn’t evident or never considered? What happens when the real, raw, imperfections of places that often pull people with discerning and distinctive tastes toward them are ignored, including the untiring efforts of hosting communities anxious to be involved and accepted? If only more communities-as-destinations would portray a multiplicity of nuanced and diverse images and a diversity of efforts rather than a singular, commoditized or sanitized image or portrayal.

Problematic, also, is the derivative and commoditized nature of many place or destination branding efforts that are rarely co-created. While also challenged by impoverished visual brand aesthetics or ad visibility, an inability to reach the right audiences, and the difficulties associated with measuring true impact, there is nothing worse than getting lost in information space, with more and more of it being controlled by influencers prone to exaggerate and misinform.

When insufficient consideration is given to the best interests of communities, residents, and organizations, the ability to generate long-term value for them is likely to be forgone.…value that is experiencing existential crises promulgated by marketers and branders who prioritize exchange value rather than contextually relevant value-in-use or value-in-experience that should valorize a destination`s purpose by conferring value and ensuring that it is equitably shared among all of a community`s stakeholders.

Neglectful of purpose and principles, strategies, the creation and capture of value, communities are likely to find their portrayal and posturing (primarily determined through branding) veering off-track. The likely result: The inability to grow or extend tourism area life cycles due to the regularization of regret and reprisal…

Such an outcome needn`t be. With the resolve to act and energize rectification, communities-as-destinations can regain their footing, reframe their identities and image. It`s likely to be a momentous task – it takes time to turnaround any brand - requiring herculean efforts to transform leadership in a human-centered ways; master teamwork among leaders; rebuild trust in communities; apply pragmatism and imagination; train and develop super-communicators, not just on a person-to-person basis, but in a more prevalent journalistic sense.

Revising the communication and re-activating the portrayal of place requires altering the symbolism, narrative and image of place in ways that will cherish the value-in-experience for hosts and guests. Inevitably it can be a tedious process requiring considered thought about the utilization of resonant prose and photography that serves to create awareness, attract visitation, activate and especially revitalize an audience`s contemplative space that`s under attack in today`s attention economy.

In this sense words matter. They must resonate if they are to convince and help us improve how to relate to the world and each other. For those involved in preparing scripts and descriptions it certainly might be useful to take a refresher course on prose, as well as in the use of characterization and sensory language.

Stories matter more, however, they must be powerful. As Steve Jobs remarked: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” And when stories are shaped by place and tug at our heart strings, they help us perceive and discover the soul of a place. In the process, they create and help us feel a sense of attachment to a place and lead to a better understanding of ourselves. Such is the talent of writers, such as Jan Morris, exemplified in her work, Destinations, Essays from Rolling Stone and use of allegory,

More to the point is this vignette: A sense of belonging in Newfoundland and Labrador as poetically and quietly told by an engaging community host, and notable in its use of language that makes people feel at home, not an outsider, and is reflective of the pull of homeland and heritage, folklore and the future.

As a Canadian east coast island province whose landscapes, seascapes, and vacationscapes have been elevated through award-winning excellence in advertising and the visual side of storytelling, Newfoundland and Labrador`s tangled tale epitomizes the substantive and evolving nature of the cultural and social representations of islands that serves as a reminder to all communities-as-destinations.

But there can be a dark side to ill-thought-out representations that can have consequential implications. Consider all the island destinations that portray themselves as `paradise` leading local citizens to respond: To Hell with Paradise. People expressing trouble for feeling excluded. Feeling bereft from tourism`s hedonic pleasure seekers.

Sticking with island life and in another way, it is amazing how some become consumed and overwhelmed through the characters in certain novels. For example, in Prince Edard Island, this Canadian province is inundated with fans of Anne of Green Gables a predominant advertising theme for the province.

Then there is the role played by cinematic depiction and television series like the King of Thrones, filmed in Dubrovnik. They alter the portrayal of destinations through the prominent and extensive reach of media, new media technologies, social media (e.g. the Instagram effect), and artificial intelligence (AI), but in the process vastly increase the volumes of visitors… conveying a simultaneous perception that is often skewed in weird and worrisome ways.

In essence, the issues that so many communities-as-destinations wrestle with these days have to do with the positive or negative associations that media consumers make with programmatic content, storylines, the actors, influencers, storytellers, and the visualized locational imagery. To the point that media and AI are now being used to re-shape entire pre-to-post visit experiences.

Use of photography in particular, despite regulations in some jurisdictions governing its commercial use, has always been an essential tool used to entice visitation, but it`s use in initiating place brand equity requires critical attention. Early in my career, when criticizing destination advertising for what I considered to be `color blindness` in who played what role in ads (glamorous white people as visitors, black residents as smiling servants) I was put in my place by an annoyed ad agency executive. Thankfully, such portrayals are now starting to shift, as destination clients are demanding better depiction of reality, diversity, inclusion and equity…still only up to a certain point, though!

In my mind, visual hyperbole (exemplified in places like Guatape, Columbia to harvest tourist’s money) could be downplayed by putting greater focus on sensibility, for example, improving visitor safety, decolonizing travel, promoting sustainability, giving life to the intangible representation of cultures and all the sensory components that highlight the astonishing aspects of the visitor experience – the sights, sounds, songs, smells, the textures of place.

For years I have been a proponent of visitor-employed photography, especially as a research tool that can establish the who, what, when, where, and how of the visitor (and resident) experience, their level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Photography, interpreted though prose, that could be used not only in advertising and promotions, but also to:

· Identify and communicate the consequences of tourism`s impacts.

· Encourage the participative, collaborative, co-creation involvement of concerned hosts anxious to visualize, transform and revitalize tourism in innovative ways.

· Adopt a future-forward, more inspirational and imaginative way of portraying and realizing progressiveness.

· Create a city/nation/place portfolio of ideas and ideals.

· Develop a reconstructed place branding strategy tied into the plural and more comprehensive nature of country/regional/local strategies.

· Use of authentic and creative representations that lift spirits, engage souls, strengthen attachments, clarify identity, and create value at the top rungs of the hierarchy.

The soul and sense of place putting a little love into our hearts.