This kind of ties into one of my issues with a great deal of DMOs, in that far too many try to position the destination to be everything to everyone. It’s simply impossible. Destination A may not have the hotel and convention center space, Destination B may not have the restaurant / nightlife / music / art culture, Destination C may not have the public transit, so on and so forth — yet those destinations are all battling for the visitor without differentiating themselves in any realistic fashion.

Simplicity is very difficult, I fully agree — in the incipient stages of establishing simplicity, that is. One of my mantras is that “we are not our audience” — we can tell ourselves who our target audience or target visitor is until we’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t mean anything. Real research, real analysis and real hard looks at our destination are the way to get to that point.

I love email marketing, and my guiding principle in email marketing is to send timely, targeted, relevant and valuable email to people who have asked to receive it. Destination marketing, in a general sense, operates in exactly the same way. Do research and surveys of your email list. Analyze your social media insights. Dig into your Google Analytics and see who’s actually coming to your website. Draw conclusions from that data, and act upon it — don’t naively, or arrogantly, assume that just because you’re crafting a message to a specific audience, it means the audience is seeing it.

Do the work to figure out who your audience is. Target your message towards that audience. After that hard work, simplicity becomes easy, because you already know your target market as a result of that work. 

Target and Wal-Mart are the places that are everything to everyone. Don’t try to force your destination into that artificial one-size-fits-all category.

Occam’s razor.