Uncovering the Tasmanian Brand Story: Insights from Collaborative Place Branding with Brand Tasmania
This blog shares insights about Brand Tasmania’s approach to uncovering the Tasmanian Brand and how Folket Consultancy supported the organisation in their place branding work. You'll learn about Brand Tasmania’s collaboration with Folket Consultancy, from qualitative research, interviewing, workshop reflections and report writing, offering insights into Tasmania's brand values and community.
About Brand Tasmania – uncovering the Tasmanian Brand
When you hear the word ‘brand’ images of logos and taglines might come to your mind. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Under the surface, just like culture, lies the elements that make up your brand and identity.
Brand Tasmania is Australia’s first statutory place-branding authority, created under the Brand Tasmania Act 2018. Brand Tasmania launched in 2019 as a new model for place-branding, based on research, a unifying cultural expression, and a project-based strategy. In Tasmania, place branding has expanded from being a traditional marketing activity to a policy process that can deliver real public value.
The Tasmanian brand is so much more than a logo or a tagline. It’s about Tasmanian people and what they’ve achieved through struggle, hard work, and ingenuity. Brand Tasmania help Tasmanians express the Tasmanian brand. They help Tasmanians share their own stories through the lens of the Tasmanian brand story and invite all Tasmanians to be a part of it.
Brand Tasmania's purpose is to bring more value to everything Tasmanian. Their mission is to inspire and encourage Tasmanians and those who want to be Tasmanian to “quietly pursue the extraordinary”.
The challenge by Brand Tasmania – our task at hand
Following Brand Tasmania’s initial engagement and research project interviewing 200 Tasmanians in 2018 to uncover the Tasmanian Brand Story, Brand Tasmania wanted to understand how the perception and values of the Tasmanian Brand had evolved over the past five years.
Ongoing research into your place brand is important to make sure it continues to be aligned with your community’s evolving values and identity and maintains its appeal as proper representation of the place. For Brand Tasmania, this meant they wanted to reconnect with Tasmanians to test the relevancy of the values identified in 2018, five years on. To do this, they set out to interview 100 Tasmanians across the state.
Brand Tasmania, led by CEO Todd Babiak, engaged Folket Consultancy to work in collaboration with their team to support conducting the qualitative interviews and research. The project lead was Jessica Radford, Director of Place Branding and Operations at Brand Tasmania. Along with helping to complete the 100 interviews, Folket Consultancy was tasked to analyse the collected stories and write a report summarising our findings, comparing them against the brand values identified in 2018.
How Folket Consultancy collaborated with Brand Tasmania – our process
Collaboration is a key element when Folket Consultancy works with a client and this project was no different. The initial phase in any project we do is designing the process details with the client to ensure their needs will be met. We also tailor the team based on the skills required. On this project, the Folket team was made up by the following folks: Linda Karlsson and Dr. Meghan Bond. Key skills used on this project were research, evaluation, analysis and communications.
We co-facilitated a workshop to develop a set of interview questions and shared approach of all interviews.
This was then followed by the development of a semi-structured interview guide to capture key aspects of the Tasmanian experience related to belonging, uniqueness, opportunities, challenges, and pride. The interview guide was developed based on the previous interview script and structured in a way that it can be re-used for future research.
The experience of the client is always at the center of our work. In our workshop, we focused on knowledge-sharing and exploring the expertise held by Brand Tasmania. We discussed their experience in conducting place branding activities and their insights about Tasmania’s place brand.
100 Tasmanian’s and their stories - Brand Tasmania
In this research, we spoke to 100 interviewees from 26 of the 29 Tasmanian local government areas.
The demographics of the Tasmanians aligned with Australian Bureau of Statistics data.
Interviews were 1h long, recorded and transcribed.
In total, we had over 100 hours of recordings, 1,780 pages of text and 637,436 words.
To manage the massive amount of data, Folket Consultancy used the qualitative data analysis software NVivo.
Interpreting Insights: Workshop Reflections on Tasmania's Brand
Once the interviews were done, we had another workshop to bring the team together, reflect and learn.
Workshop number two was held following the interviews to check in with the team, discuss findings and our shared emerging themes across the interviews.
Insights from this workshop were also used to inform the report's analysis structure.
Analysing the interviews and writing the report on Tasmania’s Place Brand
At the end of the 100 interviews, we had enough data to write a detailed report on the key findings for Brand Tasmania.
The qualitative research revealed that the brand values identified in 2018 still hold true, with slight variations and additional details. Tasmanians are navigating a delicate balance between tradition and progress, connectedness and isolation, and have a strong sense of pride and optimism about their future. The insights from this research will guide Brand Tasmania in maintaining a brand story that reflects the unique Tasmanian identity and supports the community's aspirations.
Place Branding, Stories and People – The Role of Community in Place Branding
For a place brand to be relevant and true to the place, you need to speak to the people of that place. In this instance, that meant engaging in qualitative research through interviews. Your method of engagement may change or be mixed depending on the process you set out in the design phase and the questions you want answered.
Folket Consultancy always work in collaboration with the client to identify the challenge at hand, what the key questions are to resolve, and the most appropriate process to get there.
Folket Consultancy always use a flexible approach in our work. Often, the exact details of the process and task at hand are only confirmed once we have conducted our design phase with the client and their team. The approach allows for the work to be tailored to the client’s needs and make sure we achieve the best outcomes for them and their communities.
It was a pleasure working with Brand Tasmania and their dedicated team on this place brand project, and doing our small part to help Tasmanians in their “quiet pursuit of the extraordinary”.
For more information about place branding and Folket Consultancy, please contact us.
About Brand Tasmania
Brand Tasmania is Australia’s first statutory place-branding authority, created under the Brand Tasmania Act 2018. Brand Tasmania launched in 2019 as a new model for place-branding, based on research, a unifying cultural expression, and a project-based strategy. Brand Tasmania help Tasmanians express the Tasmanian brand. For more information, visit the Brand Tasmania website.
About Folket Consultancy
Hej! "Folket" is Swedish and means "The People", think 'folks' in English. We’re a boutique consultancy based in lutruwita/Tasmania. Founded by Linda Karlsson, Folket Consultancy is a collective of experienced consultants. Our team of folks love to work on collaborative projects that create an impact in our communities. Between us, we offer expertise in evaluation, research, facilitation of workshops and community consultation, co-design and program development, community and stakeholder engagement, as well as strategic communication. We tailor our team and services to your needs. Do you think you have a Folket job? Let’s explore how we can collaborate, contact Folket Consultancy here.