Every place is a terroir.

observation — attributed to Don Welsh

Welsh leads more than 770 destinations on a single premise, that no two are alike. Each carries its own soil, story, and self-image, like wines from neighboring hillsides. The fatal error is selling places as interchangeable inventory. The moment a city markets itself like every other city, it has nothing left to sell. The work of the destination organization is to name what only this place has and refuse to launder it into a template.

For destination marketers tempted by category-standard campaigns. The exercise is to write the pitch, then strike every sentence that would be equally true of three other cities, and see what remains.

place-identity, differentiation, marketing, sense-of-place