Marketing Elves By: Isa 2 comments

Jussa and Nessi - The Ranua Elves

Hello dear readers!

Here we are once again with an exciting blog post for you 😄

In the last two weeks we have been up to quite a lot in our studies, and all the knowledge we gained can in fact be applied to our project work we introduced in one of our previous blog posts.

So this is the time to reveal more about our project, which includes two elves called Jussa and Nessi, and how to apply what we learnt in helping these elves to deliver memorable experiences and implement a marketing campaign 😉

About Our Project

Our study course related project consisted in designing and marketing a Lappish themed pop-up service, which would be perceived as a memorable experience by its users. 

The pop-up concept we designed is called "Lappish Elfie-Booth", and consists of a Lappish-themed photobooth operated by two Elves. 

The pop-up has been designed around the story of the two elves from the tradition of a Lappish village called Ranua. These elves are called Jussa and Nessi, and they will be introducing their story and the elements of Lappish nature and culture to people of all ages in our pop-up. They will be also the ones taking polaroid-style instant pictures of the customers posing with Lappish items in front of a background depicting Lapland throughout different seasons.

Lappish Elfie-Booth Product Card made by us during our project-work

How To Create Experiences

As part of our study course, we attended a lecture about experiences in tourism by Bianca Kluin (2019). From the lecture we learned some additional information on how to create meaningful experiences, which turned out useful when analysing the pop-up concept we designed. 

Very important part of creating experiences, that grabbed our attention from the lecture handout, are the experience characteristics and imagineering.

Such characteristics of an experience are: theme, business as stage, guest involvement, appealing of all senses and creation of memories. This means that the experience needs to have a specific theme and the business behind it should set a storyline and define actors and background as if it would be a play on a stage. Moreover, the experience should be made interactive for the customers, involving all or most of their senses, and it should be designed to stay in their minds as a pleasant memory. 

When taking a look at our pop-up idea, it can be seen that it has been designed to meet all of the characteristics mentioned above.

Imagineering, on the other hand, refers to the process of experience creation and, as you might guess, is a combination of imagination and engineering. Imagineering is done through the "ABCDE" method, which stands for Analysing (attention), Breeding (brainstorming), Creation (vision and concept), Design (building the experience) and Exchange (communication). 

In creating our pop-up concept, we used imagineering in the way that we aimed at implementing creative ideas in a practical form.

When creating an experience, the four realms of an experience by Pine and Gilmore  (1998) should also be taken into account. The four realms are: Educational, Escapist, Esthetic and Entertainment. To be truly memorable, an experience should make use of all four realms, thus hitting the so called "sweet spot" right in the middle.

Four Realms of an Experience by Pine and Gilmore (1998)

Ranua Workshop And Our Pop-Up

On the 5th of April, 2019, we participated in a workshop day in Ranua as part of our study course. During this day we both hosted our own workshop and participated in other workshops along with fellow students from LapinAMK and entrepreneurs from the Municipality of Ranua.

Ranua is a small village in Southern Lapland, and as you could read in one of our previous posts, Visit Ranua is one of our commissioners for the study course related project we are working on.

Upon discovering that Ranua has its own elves - which are living in the tower of a castle in the most well-known attraction in the area, i.e. the Ranua Zoo - we decided to include them in the design process of our pop-up service.

Jussa and Nessi in the Ranua Zoo

As we mentioned before, these elves are called Jussa and Nessi and are part of the traditions and fairytales of Ranua. However, they have been almost forgotten, and currently not much visibility is given to their story and presence in Ranua.

We decided to give them an active role in our pop-up service, in order to bring their story back to life, and so give an example of how they could be included in various tourism activities aiming at integrating all of them in Ranua as a tourism destination.

We believe that creating a common story - or in this case reviving it and adding new elements to the original one - that acts as a thread connecting the activities provided by the Ranua Municipality, could boost Ranua as a holistic tourism destination and bring up the attractiveness of local traditions.

In the workshop we hosted in Ranua, we showcased our pop-up concept and the grounds for it to various local entrepreneurs, and discovered that some of them were not quite familiar with the story of Jussa and Nessi, while others had a very deep emotional attachment to them and highly supported our idea in bringing their story back to life.

This confirmed our opinion, that Ranua - both as a tourism destination and as the home of the locals - could only benefit from the revitalisation of Jussa and Nessi's story.

Unfortunately, we only recently discovered that the rights behind Jussa and Nessi are currently not in Ranua. So, in our workshop, we emphasised the importance for Ranua to gain those rights back. Upon our ideas and the general understanding of the key role of Jussa and Nessi, arrangements have already been made by Ranua in the matter of gaining the rights back.

Instagram Workshop And Our Pop-Up

One of our lectures we had within the past few weeks was an Instagram workshop, where we - the students - found out about how to use and optimise the usage of Instagram for marketing.

The topics were:

1 How to create a good post
2 Photos & Videos
3 How to create a business profile
4 Stories & LIVE
5 Insights & Algorithm
6 Followers
7 Ethics

As a result, we compiled a small “Instagram instructions” -guide out of what everyone found out about these topics.

Not to fill up the whole post with information about each topic, the Instagram Help Centre provides a lot of useful information!

But, how do we benefit from Instagram for our project?

We have chosen to use Instagram as one of the tools for marketing our pop-up, for its easy use - even for elves - and accessibility.

The profile would be operated by the elves, with the content being “elfish” and bringing out the contrast between elves and modern technology.

Moreover, the posts would contain information about the elves and other cultural elements.

However, as mentioned earlier on this post, we may not be able to use these particular elves in the marketing of the pop-up, due to the copyright issues. Keeping our fingers crossed 🤞

---

Bibliography

Kluin, B. 2019. Lapland UAS. Lecture. Experience in Tourism. Models of Experience Design. 27 March 2019.

Pine, B.J. & Gilmore, J.H. 1998. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business Review.