Look at the info graphic at Lab42 that illustrates highlights of some recent research.

Local tourism leaders are poised to unveil a new strategy to boost their industry — promoting what they are calling the “Hidden Gems of the Space Coast.”

The campaign, which has been 1½ years in the making, centers on a new website and printed material touting local attractions beyond the ones most people know, such as the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. It includes seven half-day to full-day self-guided tours of nature, historic, archaeological and space-related venues.

Among the attractions featured are the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, the historic Pritchard House Museum in Titusville, the Air Force Space and Missile History Center and Turkey Creek Sanctuary in Palm Bay.

The success of the effort would boost the local economy by increasing attendance at the attractions promoted, as well as providing more revenue for local hotels, restaurants, retail shops, fishing and other water recreation establishments throughout the Space Coast, tourism officials say.

“It can be a big deal,” said Rob Varley, executive director of the Space Coast Office of Tourism.

One of the goals of the hidden gems campaign is to persuade out-of-town tourists to spend more time in Brevard County by making them aware of all the Space Coast has to offer.

Varley said the typical travel party is two or three people, and that party would spend an average of $341 a day while in Brevard. So the dollars can add up if tourism promoters can get more travel parties to spend four or five days here, instead of three, for example.

The hidden gems website has seven detailed self-guided “adventures,” consisting of two to four attractions each, plus suggested nearby restaurants. The adventures and restaurants were researched and written up by local experts.

The site’s space adventure, for example, lists two space museums that are less-known than KSC, which is Brevard’s most popular paid tourist attraction. They are the U.S. Space Walk of Fame & Museum in downtown Titusville and the Air Force site just outside the security gate at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The four nature-focused adventures, called “wildlife encounters,” list attractions in four parts of the county — north, central, south mainland and south beaches.

“We give them information that people here on the ground know,” said Linda Brandt, chief executive officer of Merritt Island-based Brandt Ronat + Co., who designed the hidden gems website and helped coordinate the gathering of text and photos for the site. The information might include the best time of the day or season of the year to see a manatee or scrub jay.

Brandt said most of the sites highlighted are free or have low admission prices.

“This is an idea that has brewing for a long, long time,” Brandt said.

Varley said the approach “sprung out from our desire to promote nature tourism” at a time when the space shuttle program was winding down.

“We can’t just hang our hat on space and the beach,” Varley said.

Initially, Space Coast tourism leaders organized three meetings in August 2010, at which they asked local residents to discuss their favorite area places and activities. Brevard Zoo Executive Director Keith Winsten and Titusville restaurateur and ecotourism advocate Laurilee Thompson then co-chaired a Tourism Loop Steering Committee from which the hidden gems adventures evolved.

Winsten said local tourism officials next week plan to start a four-month blitz to promote the hidden gems, which will run through mid-July. That will include promotion of the website, as well distributing printed copies of the maps and descriptions of seven self-guided tours to about 80 sites in Brevard, including local chambers of commerce, hotels and restaurants.

“This is a grass-roots effort,” Winsten said, initially focusing largely on development of the website content and on organizing the content to optimize the chances that people searching for tourist information about the Space Coast will view the site.

Major tourist attractions like the KSC Visitor Complex and Ron Jon Surf Shop in Cocoa Beach are mentioned on the website, but that is not its focus.

“I don’t think tourists have a problem finding KSC or the beach or the zoo,” Winsten said.

In contrast, Winsten said, 99 percent of our tourists don’t know about the Ritch Grissom Memorial Wetlands at Viera, a prime viewing spot for many species of birds, as well as alligators, turtles and otters. The Grissom wetland site is featured on the “wildlife encounter of Central Brevard adventure.”

“That’s a great hidden gem,” Winsten said. “It takes people someplace off the beaten track.”

Thompson, who is co-owner of Dixie Crossroads Seafood Restaurant in Titusville and a member of the Brevard County Tourist Development Council, said experts wrote the content for the website, and top local nature photographers provided many of the images.

“Each of the seven experiences has been carefully curated, and we’re very proud of the product,” Thompson said. “We’d like these experiences to be ‘stay-extenders’ ’’ that encourage visitors to stay in town longer so they can visit more attractions.

To see more information about Brevard’s hidden gems, visit www.spacecoasthiddengems.com.

Time Served from Eric Emerick on Vimeo.

Details of the Recommendation:

“As a founder of an Aerospace start-up firm, I received a recommendation to seek out Ryan and Linda specifically, and the firm Brandt Ronat + Co. from a venture capitalist I was working with. I remember the comment “Madison Avenue Quality without the Madison Avenue Overhead and Drama.“ My firm then competed off a number of other marketing firms arriving at BRC as our primary and only marketing partner. Their “Analytical Creative” process very quickly arrived at the very essence of my firm’s brand, and their easy going, hardworking, and exceptionally creative expertise was exactly what we needed to differentiate our new brand in the crowded aerospace segment while also providing a platform for growth going forward.

I don’t think we could have made a better decision even if we had included Madison Avenue firms, which interestingly, was a comment that one of BRCs references mentioned to me in a phone interview. He being the marketing director with a large budget for a Major Defense Prime and stating he had used both famous Marketing Firms and BRC, with Ryan, Linda, and the entire BRC team performing far better and far more quickly than anyone on Madison Avenue.”

Service Category: Marketing

Year first hired: 2011

Top Qualities: Great Results, Expert, Creative

Samuel Havelock Jr., (U.S. Navy SEAL Officer, Program Manager – Special Boat/Combatant Craft PMO, U.S. Special Operations Command)

In this very unusual case, the design is a fire place…well, really a fire hut or fire cave. And its user audience is children.

But it is its purpose for being that is outstanding: a place to talk to each other, or more precisely a special place to tell stories and let them fully unfold.

 “Fireplace for children”    All Photos © Jason Havneraas & Fredriksen, Grethe

Through many research scenarios with different premises, the answer remains surprisingly the same: Pairing valuable offers with minimally worthwhile extras may not be your best path.

It may seem like sweetening the deal is simply a good idea and should be considered by customers as more and better than the single offer, but evidence points to the opposite: the additional offer may be more than a detraction from the primary thought, it has for many people the effect of devaluing the overall offer.

In one example, 227 students at the University of Michigan and Princeton University were split into “presenters” and “evaluators.” Presenters were to pretend they were hotel owners preparing an online offer. For the ad, they had to choose whether only to reveal the hotel pool’s 5-star rating, or the pool rating plus information about the hotel’s three-star restaurant. The evaluators, pretend they were planning a vacation, were either shown an ad featuring only the 5-star pool or the 5-star pool and the 3-star restaurant. Results: the evaluators who saw the ad featuring both the pool and the restaurant were willing to pay significantly less per night than those who saw the advertisement featuring the 5-star pool only. Even so, 72 percent of the presenters had chosen to include both the 5-star pool and 3-star restaurant in their ad.

According to Kimberlee Weaver, assistant professor of marketing in the Pamplin College of Business, “there’s a phenomenon that occurs when a gift recipient is turned off by the pairing of a big and a small present called “presenter’s paradox.”

Kimberlee Weaver, will have this white paper on the subject, “The Presenter’s Paradox,” published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Link to study HERE 

The REMIX campaign for Community Credit Union of Florida has an “indie” vibe, a hands-on, hand-drawn, creatively delivered concept composed of musical allusions and bringing into focus the chance for rethinking, resetting, rewinding old loan decisions (“remixing”) to refi, recharge and restart your loans…all messages built from a set of hand-cut paper illustrations tied to a specific high-identity url and brought to life in videos using good age-appropriate voice talent and great movement choreography.

The campaign crossed almost all mediums (Newspaper; Web; Facebook Pay-Per-Click; Cable; Billboard; Site Signage and more).  But, at the end of the day, the ROI of the campaign was nothing less than a home run.  Congrats to the team over at CCU.  We were happy to support this wonderful campaign and we look forward to many more in the future.

Honorable mention goes to the 40 year anniversary campaign for Gatto’s Tires & Auto Service.

This campaign used the mediums of Cable, Social, Web, Online, Facebook Pay-Per-Click, Yahoo, Print, Outdoor Billboards and more importantly our hearts.  We appreciate the Gatto’s and what they have meant to our company and community over the years.  Here is to 4o more successful years.

Sneak peek at next year…watch out for Hidden Gems on the Space Coast and Gatto’s.  Things are about to get interesting.

Happy New Year Everyone.  2012 will be a great year.  

Consider this: we as consumers get unsolicited (postal) mail daily, yet this is a universally accepted form of marketing, but, if I were to email the exact same content in an unsolicited manner it (at a much higher %) would be considered obtrusive and further often destructive to the brand we may be marketing. Take that a step further to SMS…even if I opt into an SMS channel for some reason, unequivocally as a customer I do not want to be marketed to. It will do harm to the brand.

Now, utilizing SMS as a customer convenience for one-off scenarios that are directly initiated by the customer is fine, but follow-on unexpected marketing communications represent a significant diminishing return.

Obviously there are many options within this realm that may be considered ‘more right’ than others, but I’d prefer to keep SMS a safe haven for personal communications and not a litany of mass deletes like my email has become.

“sales and marketing” eventually we (the industry) will probably screw this medium up as well.

Don’t get me started on how little people actually read and absorb these days.

Ryan L. Brandt
@launchryan

Written by

Maria Sonnenberg | For FLORIDA TODAY

Brandt Ronat + Company
Marketing | Advertising Agency ‘Communicate Better’