By now, you are probably familiar with the story of Herouxville, Quebec, whose town council published a code of conduct outlining the town’s customs for prospective immigrants.
 
Their resolutions include a ban on the public stoning of women, a declaration that individuals should be free to choose their own spouses, a warning that their local custom includes allowing people of both sexes to use swimming pools at the same time (“don’t be surprised, this is normal for us”) and a ban on wearing face coverings at any time except Halloween.
 
I’ll leave the political debate to others, but there is an interesting lesson here for tourism marketers.
 
As of Wednesday January 31, Googling “Canada. Keep Exploring” yields zero news articles and 13 blog mentions a full year after the brand’s launch.  Googling “Herouxville” yields 120 news stories and 446 blog entries less than 24 hours after the story broke.
 
“Canadian Village Outlaws Stoning” and other sensational headlines have appeared as far afield as Ireland, Germany, South Africa, Singapore, Australia, and all across Canada and the United States.  Fox News is all over the story like a fat kid on a Smartie and Bill O’Reilly finally has something good to say about his neighbours to the North.
 
In other words, tiny Herouxville, Quebec (population 1,300) has achieved more buzz in a day than the Canadian tourism industry has been able to muster in a year.
 
The simple response is to say that Herouxville has captured the public imagination because it is controversial – and controversy sells.  Australia’s “Where the Bloody Hell are You?” is another case in point. But dig a little deeper and the lesson from Herouxville isn’t to inject a little controversy into tourism marketing, but to focus on what makes something news- and talk-worthy.
 
News is news because it’s timely and has context and relevance in the reader’s (or writer’s) daily life. Herouxville isn’t generating buzz just because it’s absurd, it’s generating buzz because it’s timely and relevant.  In a post 9-11 world, Herouxville taps into the ongoing debate around personal freedoms, racial profiling, multiculturalism, etc.
 
If you had been sitting in a bar in Herouxville a few days ago (and their Code of Conduct states that they enjoy consuming alcohol in public and private places), and someone claimed that they could make the tiny village famous on the world stage in just a day, you probably would have taken the bet (though the Code is silent on the subject of wagering).
 
And you would have lost. Because rather than launching an expensive advertising campaign, the village elders simply took a moment to think about what was already on peoples’ minds (i.e. what topics already had “buzz”) and found a relevant way to insert an intriguing message from Herouxville into the pre-existing wave of public interest.  Shazam -- Herouxville is world famous (or infamous, I suppose).
 
Now think about this in terms of tourism marketing.  One of our greatest challenges is shifting consumers from a desire to visit “some day” to an intent to visit NOW.  The destinations that win most often aren’t the ones that communicate an enduring sense of timelessness, but the ones that create a sense of urgency and timeliness – the ones that have “a scene” not just “scenery” – the ones that find a place for themselves in popular culture, not just in travel magazines.
 
The challenge facing most tourism organizations is that we put the bulk of our effort toward annual plans – programs whose planning cycles and time horizons rob them of the benefit of being timely and relevant.  We focus on “breaking through the clutter” when a smarter strategy may be to engage in a clutter of a different sort – the clutter of conversations and everyday life.
 
If we take a page from Herouxville’s playbook (ok, maybe not a literal page, though I have no issue with the bit about drinking in public and private places), we’d spend less time figuring out clever ways to interrupt people and more time figuring out how to participate in the conversations they’re already having.  Consumer generated content is one way to facilitate the conversation, but the destination itself also has to have a voice in the discussion.  And hopefully have something interesting and relevant to say.
 
When “Canada. Keep Exploring” was developed, the decision was made that our positioning shouldn’t be about us, but about the traveler.  Following that line of logic, we shouldn’t act like the self-obsessed bore at the party -- we should talk about things that people want to talk about. And nobody talks about travel 24 hours a day. 






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