When a journey becomes a brand

Written by Claire Madden

Back in July, I wrote about Kitzbühel and how a place can become a brand. Having just returned from driving Scotland’s NC500, I’ve been thinking about the same idea from a rather different perspective: what happens when it’s the journey itself that becomes the brand?

The NC500 was launched as a concept eleven years ago – a road trip looping around the North Highlands of Scotland – and is already tagged as one of the world’s most iconic road trips.

And we’d concur – it was a stunning experience. We drove it in my 23-year-old Audi TT Roadster, taking in staggeringly diverse scenery around seemingly every twisting bend, ancient castles, craggy ranges, beaches that looked like they belonged in the Caribbean.  Paired with diverse accommocation, delicious seafood, the odd nip of locally distilled beverages, and perhaps most remarkably for Scotland, beautiful weather; we were lucky.

But before we’d even started, a man in Inverness offered us a rather different perspective.

“It’s just the A9.”

And, in one sense, he was right.

The roads were already there. So were the castles, sea stacks, islands, beaches and communities along the way. The NC500 didn’t create any of them.

What it did was package them. You give the journey a name and a visual identity, join the individual experiences together and suddenly you’ve created something people want to say they’ve “done”.

What I found particularly interesting, though, was how lightly that brand sits on the actual experience.  There’s no grand starting gate or finishing line. You can travel clockwise or anticlockwise. You decide where to stop, how long to stay and what matters enough to divert from the route for. Every so often, an unassuming brown NC500 sign reassures you that you’re still on it.

Someone else’s NC500 could look completely different from ours – at every stop, my little old car rubbed shoulders with motorbikes, camper vans, 4x4s, bicycles – yet we were all on the same mission.

That feels important from a branding perspective. Strong brands need enough definition to be recognisable, but perhaps they don’t always need to control every part of the narrative.

The NC500 provides the framework and then leaves space for people to make it their own.

Which takes me back to that comment in Inverness.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about the NC500 is that, underneath it all, it really is “just the A9” and a collection of other existing roads.

But somebody recognised that those roads, landscapes, places and experiences could mean more when joined together. They gave people a way to navigate them, talk about them and, ultimately, feel a small sense of achievement from completing them.

Maybe that’s the cleverest part of the branding.  The NC500 hasn’t really branded a road at all.

It’s branded the idea of a journey – and one I heartily recommend!