Before you get started, be forewarned, this is not an invitation for the faint of heart. Any time an individual entrepreneur endeavors to follow the path of success demonstrated by incredibly successful business leaders like Jobs or Chouinard, the odds are astronomically assailed against the ultimate realization of outcomes similar to theirs. Still, I believe it is an exhilarating and worthwhile experience to push your limits as a business creator and environmentally concerned activist while promoting an economic solution that can help balance the needs of man and the planet. From my point of view, it begins with a vision of how it all could work.
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If your community agrees that your geographical region’s ecological and/or cultural heritage assets and balance offer a uniquely interesting or impressive natural setting and/or facets of history, you may have a basis for inviting traveling guests to come and enjoy it with you and your neighbors. The primary component determining the potential for success lies in how well the place and the experience will match up with prospective visitors’ desire to find trips that are fulfilling to their particular sense of value. Following closely on the heels of this determination, the place must also be found to have a true claim to being the best way to provide geotourists with the experience they seek. It’s an interesting puzzle to unravel.
As Steve Jobs repeatedly affirmed during his ascent to the position of world famous visionary and business creator, the entrepreneur who is considering a new product has a responsibility to consider product designs that the consumer doesn’t yet know they will demand to purchase. In simple terms, the consumer often doesn’t know what he/she wants until they see it offered for purchase and use. Jobs proved to have a uncanny ability to see products in terms of their design before industry trends or conventional wisdom deemed a market could or would exist. The products Apple and Pixar created while Jobs served at their helm, often broke new ground leading away from what the rest of the industry considered reasonable alternatives to the features provided by competitors. Jobs proved to be correct in his approach to dreaming up what he felt had value in terms of the experience that new customers would receive and he could deliver.
Yvon Chouinard, at Patagonia, built a company that honored an inherent dedication to supplying the highest quality outdoor and mountain climbing gear that he and his fellow adventurers would desire for their own use. As far as I could tell, he did not set out to reap optimized profits. I do know that he and his company focused on what they found they wanted for their own use. They understood that other like minded adventurers (NEO’s and Evolvers ) would appreciate the value of quality they designed into their clothes and accessories. Always conscious of the environmental impact of what he was doing, he led his company to a position of satisfying customers (NEO’s & Evolvers) with products that were typically more expensive than Patagonia’s competitors’ products.
Customers bought their products, relied on their products and helped build the Patagonia brand name into a global leader because of the unique ability of their products to satisfy the use and the experience they found they appreciated. More traditional shoppers are predominantly concerned with obtaining the lowest price on everything they buy and evaluate their purchases as though all products are merely commodities without significant differentiated values within each product category. The difference between Traditional consumers vs. the NEO or Evolver consumers rests on how they perceive value as it is explained in the book by Chris Norton and Ross Honeywell mentioned above. If you, as a tourism entrepreneur and concerned environmentalist want to understand the details of how this marketplace can be effectively penetrated, I would suggest reading their recently published book.
Using the Apple, Pixar and Patagonia examples can be instructive for planning a geo or ecotourism development project. Any geotourism place that does not differentiate it’s brand with a distinctive product vacation experience that has a clearly discernible value that cannot be similarly obtained from another or multiple competitors will ultimately fall victim to lower priced copycats or national chain/franchise invasion.
The fundamental question for the creator lies within their own honesty about the offering. Can “I” as a potential tourism visitor sense the same translated value to “me” by making a trip to a competing location? If the answer is not resoundingly NO, then revisit your core brand and design construction. If the vacation experience can be replicated in a way that approximates the same trip value to the potential traveler and is more cheaply or easily obtained, the tourist will opt for the less expensive option. Therefore, whatever the branding focus might be for place and experience, there must be an obsession with making sure that the brand securely provides a distinct and defensible barrier to another location claiming to have the ability to deliver the same tourism product.
Now, for the basis of the passion. To get others to believe it is essential that the creators are passionate about the place and the experience, even if that combination doesn’t currently exist as a deliverable product, yet. And, the passion must be tested. The message and evangelism must be forged in the crucible of real, live people making a decision to either purchase the travel option or not. The process will likely produce very slow results initially. In hindsight, if successful, it will appear to have been obvious all along. The winners, like the renowned environmental visionaries Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tomkins, for example, were not accepted and revered when they first launched their expeditions, businesses and land conservancy projects in Chile. Now, in retrospect, they have proven to the world that their insights and vision of the future was wise, noble and productive. However, whether they ultimately would have won or lost, their passion for what they saw in their own conception of balance, responsibility and a path to action supplied the energy to make it so in reality.
To learn about the philosophy they shared and reminisce with them both about their Patagonia experiences, I would highly recommended that interested readers rent or buy the documentary movie 180 South at your earliest opportunity. The first impact that will strike you is the superior cinematography that ushers you in to a luxurious view of the beauty of Chile for those who have not traveled there yet. It is also a multigenerational story of adventure that takes you along in the present while simultaneously interlacing snippets of informal conversations between Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tomkins looking back on their fascinating endeavors. If you have an interest in how to model a life that sustains environmental action, thrilling adventure and the cultivation of pragmatic approaches to finding a balance between the ecology of commerce and the balance of a healthy plant, this documentary provides all of it for you.
