City of Freiburg

A tourism brand, including a brand strategy, was to be developed for the city of Freiburg as part of a participatory, target group-oriented branding process. This was decided in 2019 by FWTM (Freiburg Economy Tourism & Trade Fairs), which is responsible for destination management in the city of Freiburg.

The aim was to develop a brand concept, analyze the core brand values of Freiburg, formulate a tourism brand positioning, and develop a tourism brand strategy.

At first glance, the Freiburg tourism brand already offered some "obvious" areas of excellence, which is why a comprehensive process did not seem necessary – Freiburg is considered the city with the most hours of sunshine in Germany and its sustainability is recognized around the world. In addition, Freiburg is located in an attractive environment. The tourism concept had already identified areas of experience that continue to exist and should be consistently incorporated.

Precisely because of these positive preconceptions, which seem so obvious, as many relevant stakeholders in Freiburg as possible should be involved in the process to ensure broad acceptance, advocacy, and implementation and to achieve a sharpening of the tourism brand. An additional challenge was the coronavirus pandemic that began in early 2020 and the associated restrictions on physical meetings.

Keeping the task going in a meaningful way: In order not to lose the interest of the stakeholders during the pandemic, we decided without further ado to hold a preparatory webinar on the topic of "Making the most of the opportunities in the restart." This was combined with a toolkit that not only conveyed brand knowledge but also delivered immediate added value from a brand perspective.

Broad involvement through different formats: At the same time, we used this phase to set up a sound stakeholder management system. The webinar was just one of the tools we used for this. We used a digital citizen survey, in-depth interviews with opinion leaders, and representatives of the most relevant stakeholder groups. In addition, a landing page was created, which was later expanded into a partner portal for regular updates on the status of the project. In order to review our interim results once again, we consulted the tourism advisory board between workshops. This helped to further refine the results.

Diverse composition of workshop groups: Because guests perceive a city as a whole and not just its tourist attractions, we decided to capture the DNA of the Freiburg brand holistically. In a participatory workshop, we involved around 30 stakeholders from all key areas of the city, which was met with an extremely positive response.

When it came to developing the city's tourist positioning based on this DNA, we worked with a group of tourism service providers.

With the help of the condensed DNA and the refined positioning, FWTM has already been able to develop specific new tourist offerings. Through the participatory process, it quickly gained partners for joint implementation, such as Freiburg's restaurant industry.

To make the change visually apparent, FWTM worked with a Freiburg-based creative agency to develop a logo that reflects the DNA.