Objective

Before we got involved, Brand USA largely marketed America as a monolith: one destination, one set of famous sites, one broad visitor motivation. That made the work feel generic and created strategic risk. If international travelers saw America as one thing, then anything negative, from political rhetoric, immigration policy, visa difficulty, or currency fluctuations, could impact perception of the entire country as a travel destination. Our assignment was to increase inbound travel and, therefore, the number of travel-related jobs. But the real problem was alignment: Brand USA needed to move a complex marketing ecosystem spanning marketing, trade, corporate partnerships, international markets, and a large agency roster away from disconnected destination promotion and toward one shared strategic direction.

Strategy

Research showed that while international travelers' perceptions of the United States were faltering, their perceptions of individual Americans were not. Across markets, travelers still admired the warmth, creativity, drive, diversity, and welcoming spirit of real Americans. That opened the strategy: separate the political abstraction of America from the lived experience of Americans. The operating rule became "Give a voice to real travel experiences in the States." One global spine, then a need-state framework that clustered 18 markets into four distinct communication jobs, so the strategy could flex by market without breaking apart. The platform shaped multiple expressions including One Big Welcome, United Stories, Hear The USA, and Insider Guides, and became the briefing and review operating layer for all of Brand USA's marketing, trade, and partnership activity.

Results

In the early campaign period, Brand USA attributed major impact to the platform: roughly $6MM in earned media coverage, nearly 70MM people reached globally, a 37% lift in consideration to visit the U.S., 1.13MM incremental visitors, and more than 52,000 incremental travel-related jobs supported. Operationally, the strategy gave marketing, trade, partnerships, international markets, and external agencies a shared way to brief, adapt, and evaluate work — allowing many different teams to create different work that still pulled in the same direction.