Most destination marketing starts with the place. That’s where it usually goes wrong.
Early on, I learned something really important working with Disney Imagineering that I've carried with me ever since. The most important part of launching any new resort, experience or destination was why the place existed. What was its story? Not what it offered. What it was meant to feel like? They spent countless hours on the details, the sight lines, the materials, the smell of the air at the entrance before a single wall went up. That's their discipline. And it shows in everything they build.
Our discipline was different but no less important to the overall success of the project. Our job was to take all of that and reverse engineer it. Imagineering could build a story into the physical world but we needed to let people know what it feels like before they get there. We needed to send the story out into the world ahead of the place itself. We needed to build that story into the minds of our audience.

Those are two very different but equally important creative problems. Most briefs don't acknowledge that. They start with the product. Here's what the place is. Here's what it offers. Here's the differentiator. And that's not wrong, you need all of that. But a brief that starts with the practical is already pointing in the wrong direction. The question isn't just "what's the story with this place?" The question is also "what should someone feel before they even get here?"
I've found that anticipation is its own emotional state. When you realize that, you're not communicating information, you're creating a specific kind of feeling. And that feeling is always personal. It's about the person, not the place. The best destination work I've done reaches into something people are quietly carrying, a version of themselves that maybe they don't visit very often, and makes that feel possible.

The physical place is the vehicle. The emotion is the destination.

When that is done right, destinations and the brands behind them don't just get customers. They get people who come back. Who tell other people. Who don't need to be convinced again because they already know, somehow, exactly how it's going to feel.
That doesn't happen by accident. It happens when both disciplines are working together. When the story is built into the place and sent out into the world ahead of it. When neither one is working alone.
Emotion is always the destination. The work is figuring out how to get people there before they even know they've left.