Beautiful scenery is not positioning

Most local tourist destinations start their brand story with a photo: golden season terraced fields, a lake at dawn, a mist-covered forest path. These are truly beautiful images. The problem is that thousands of other places have exactly the same photos. When scenic beauty is the only reason to choose, it is no longer a reason.

The trap called beautiful scenery

In the language of brand positioning, an attribute is only valuable when it is true, distinctive, and important to the buyer. Scenic beauty meets the first condition, but fails at the other two. It is not distinctive because any location can find a decent angle for a photo. And increasingly, it is less of a deciding factor, as customers have become inundated with beautiful images on social media before they book their tickets.

Byron Sharp in How Brands Grow argues that competing brands do not win by convincing customers they are better, but by being remembered at the moment customers need to buy. But to be remembered, there must be something unique enough to anchor in memory. A beautiful photo of terraced fields does not anchor anything if ten other places use the same type of photo.

Two fronts are losing at the same time

When positioning based on beautiful scenery, local tourist destinations are placing themselves in two battles that they can hardly win at the same time.

The first battle is with OTAs (Online Travel Agents). On these platforms, customers compare prices in seconds. Any destination that does not have a compelling reason to pay more will be chosen based on the lowest price. OTAs win that battle because they have data, ranking algorithms, and millions of accumulated reviews. Smaller destinations do not have equivalent weapons.

The second battle is with large resorts. Resorts have budgets for professional photography, 8K drones, stylists, and full-time communication teams. If scenic beauty is the criterion, resorts win without trying. Their images are always more beautiful, distributed more widely, and appear first in every search result.

A brand is not what you say about yourself. It is what others feel when they think of you.

Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap

Local experience: something that cannot be copied

The escape is not about taking better photos or offering deeper discounts. The escape is positioning with something that cannot be copied: experiences tied to the local culture, real people, and processes and stories that exist only there.

What cannot be replicated is not the landscape. It is the elderly Mông woman weaving traditional patterns passed down for four generations, the specific family's rice wine brewing process, and the way locals take guests to pick wild vegetables at 5 AM and then cook them for breakfast. These things cannot be transferred elsewhere. They are tightly bound to the location in a way that scenic beauty never can.

Kantar BrandZ reports that brands perceived as "meaningful and different" receive a willingness to pay that is 38% higher than the average brand in the same industry. In tourism, "meaningful" precisely refers to the feelings customers take away after their trip, not the photos they post.

Brand identity must be consistent from start to finish

A destination with good positioning but chaotic identity will still lose. Customers see beautiful photos on Instagram, visit the website and find a different font, receive a poorly presented confirmation email after booking, and arrive to find completely different signage. Each inconsistency erodes trust a little.

Wally Olins describes a brand operating through four vectors: product, environment, communication, and behavior. In tourism, all four must tell the same story. The scent of the hotel room, how staff greet guests in the morning, the type of paper the menu is printed on, the style of the tour map, all of these are part of the brand. It is not just the cover photo on Booking.com.

Build direct channels: gradually escape OTA dependence

OTAs are not the enemy. They are an effective search channel, especially for first-time customers. The problem arises when OTAs become the only channel, as destinations lose ownership of their relationship with customers. They do not have customer data, cannot follow up after the trip, and each time a customer returns, they still have to pay a commission as if it were the first encounter.

A strong brand is essential for building direct channels. When customers remember the name of a destination, they search directly instead of going to OTAs for general searches. When they remember the experience, they share it verbally, a channel that incurs no commission. This is the accumulation mechanism: a good brand reduces customer acquisition costs over time, rather than increasing them.

The questions that really need to be answered before branding

Before choosing colors, designing a logo, or hiring a photographer, the destination owner needs to answer one crucial question: if all the scenery were taken away, what would remain to tell?

If the answer is clear, deep, and cannot be applied to another point, then that is the foundation of positioning. Every brand decision, from naming, storytelling, identity design, to employee communication, is built from that foundation. If the answer is only "the scenery is better than there," then there is no positioning, only hope.

Vietnam's tourism industry is growing, with more visitors and higher spending. That is good news. But it is also when differentiation occurs the fastest: destinations with unique identities will benefit from this influx of visitors, while those with only beautiful scenery will continue to compete on price and keep losing.