During a December 2006 company meeting, it became clear that Tiamo was not the same Mom and Pop bed and breakfast it started out to be when it opened some six years ago. It had blossomed to be an upscale boutique resort, with over 30 employees and hundreds of loyal repeat guests. The company was poised for growth, which meant opening new resorts. The holding company, Progressive Earth Development, created Tiamo Resorts, a management company for a collection of boutique eco-resorts that would always be authentic, sustainable and profitable.
During its development and years of running resort operations, the owners, Mike and Petagay Hartman had unintentionally become experts in sustainable tourism. After being asked to speak at several high profile conferences and being awarded more and more awards, they soon recognized the opportunity to turn their knowledge into a business of its own. Progressive Earth Development, the parent company of Tiamo would become a consultant for sustainable development and tourism.
Gerardot was tasked with helping redefine the company's new focus and direction, finding a common voice and communicating it to an existing audience of repeat guests, as well as attracting and retaining new ones. Rebranding an existing company or product with such a loyal following is a challenge that demands a well-defined and well-planned process. We needed to first define what Tiamo had become and still aspired to be and then celebrate and express its uniqueness through imagery and a unique language.
We began our research by sifting through guest surveys, guest emails, magazine articles and of course by interviewing the client and key employees. During the brand discovery phase we looked to current guest profiles to define our target audience. We performed a competitive analysis of resorts that were as geographically close and characteristically similar to Tiamo as possible and worked to define selling points that were unique to Tiamo. From this exhaustive research and discovery spawned the creative approach: Tiamo is a place for reconnection. Reconnection to oneself, to friends and family members and to nature.
With this concept in mind, we set out to express this notion both visually and verbally. But how? Luckily, this is where Gerardot Design truly shines and the part of the creative design process we enjoy the most. Our designers collaborate and share ideas, seek visual aids, sketch and write almost endlessly to express the essence and personality of a brand. These images and thoughts are combined in a collage-like "brand board" or "mood board" that we use to communicate initial visual concepts to the client.
We were drawn to the idea of using nature, including plants, animals of different species, because they are such an integral part of the experience at Tiamo. Authenticity is another core value of this Bahamian resort paradise, so we thought the style of brand elements should be hand-drawn and imperfect, similar to the organic roughness of an Androsian batik. Lastly, the brand identity needed to communicate the notion of life cycles and regenerative energy that guests feel during and after their experience at Tiamo. The brand identity design solution is comprised of multi-color animal and plant symbols that come together to imply cyclical motion, but also the continents of the earth.
The Web site design and implementation proposed a complex set of challenges. Paramount in these challenges was the seamless migration from the existing Web site to the new one. We strategically chose the end of the high season, when Web site traffic historically begins to slow down. Because of smart and thorough SEO strategies, Tiamo has enjoyed top search engine rankings for many years, despite ongoing fractured updates and inconsistent content sources and writing styles. Without a proper search engine strategy all of this progress could be lost. The key to search engine marketing is relevant content and the creation of a strong theme throughout a site.
We determined early on that one of the most prevalent, but underused assets available was content from guests. Tiamo enjoys a very loyal following among its guests and not leveraging their voice and their advocacy would be a foolish. Tiamo's brand essence is about people reconnecting with themselves, each other and nature, and we had a mountain of testimonials and guest photos to include on the Web site. To make it easy for guests to upload their vacation photos and share their comments, we developed an administrable content management system (CMS). The CMS also allows for the client to approve these photos and comments and make text and photo changes throughout the Web site, including rates and staff changes.
The fruits of our labors have yet to be fully realized, but since its launch in June 2007, Tiamo's Web site traffic has exceeded expectations and records from previous years during this season. What's even more telling and more encouraging is that the average time spent per user visiting the site is five minutes with an average of ten pages per visit, an almost 100% increase from the previous version of the Web site.
As with any Web site, and especially with our ongoing relationship with this and all clients, our job is never done. We will continue to hone core messages, deploy awareness campaigns and fine tune Web site content. The Caribbean tourism season ramps up from September - December and we have plans to add functionality, increase usability and help add and manage a continuous flow of guest photos and comments. If all goes as planned, we'll be buried in it. But that would be a nice problem to have.
