2. Go Beyond Tastings: Make Your Brewery Experience Multisensory

Tourism experiences are consumable activities that you offer to your visitors. They can establish a personal connection between you and your visitors, provide an opportunity to promote your unique selling proposition, and provide opportunities for learning and better appreciation of your product and experience. Ideally, an experience is time-bound (set days and or times that you offer the experience), purchasable (you are charging a fee for it) and bookable (can be booked in advance online).

Craft beer tourism is well positioned for multisensory experiences, since the act of drinking usually involves smell, sight, touch, and taste. By actively focusing on sensory components you can ensure that you provide your visitors with a more immersive, enriching experience. Multisensory experiences are more memorable to visitors and provide them with a greater awareness of their surroundings. Through multisensory engagement, you can also offer your visitors greater value, ensuring that they are getting an experience that they would not be able to find anywhere else.

The follow are the key elements that make up a multisensory experience:

• Immersive: It brings a visitor directly into a process of harvesting or producing something that goes into a finished product. Or, it could be a brief immersion into a cultural practice that’s meaningfully connected to the food or drink being served.

• Active: It includes hands-on activities that allow visitors to observe and interact with what’s happening around them.

• Meaningful: It facilitates a sense of connection through feelings, thoughts, learnings, and emotions, ensuring the creation of memories that a guest keeps and shares with their networks later on.

• Engaging: A great experience captures a visitor’s attention and retains it. This facilitates positive memories from taking in the enjoyable, valuable content related to the product.

Recommendations:

• Define your unique selling proposition and learning opportunities that you believe your visitors should take away from the experience

•  Identify the sensory components that you can leverage to make your experience more immersive and enriching

• Consider making your experience purchasable and bookable when you have established the capacity

Resources:

• To learn more about multisensory experience development, complete the Multisensory Experience Development Webinar from the Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC) created in partnership with the Culinary Tourism Alliance (CTA)

3. Collaborate and Support Your Community

Craft breweries that are successful at attracting visitors understand that they play a role in building awareness of their destination rather than just their business. Your visitor experience should add to your region’s overall visitor appeal, help visitors connect to the region in a more meaningful way, and encourage return visits and referrals to your business.

Collaboration can be effective at enhancing your own visitor experience, for example through pop-up events with local chefs or restaurateurs, featuring products made by local artisans or craftspersons, or using local suppliers whose products also tell a story about your region. Beyond your own experience, collaboration is crucial to helping your community develop a robust visitor experience in general. The Food Tourism Value Chain illustrates the range of businesses that you could work with. As businesses in the value chain, you share a mutual interest in creating a more attractive destination.

Communities also have tourism-focused organizations who craft breweries can work with to attract visitors and create a more robust destination. In Ontario, this includes: RTOs (Regional Tourism Organizations), DMOs (Destination Marketing/Management Organizations) , Municipal Economic Development Departments, Chamber of Commerces/Boards of Trade and sector organizations such as the OCB and CTA. These organizations can help breweries align with local, regional or provincial tourism strategies, participate in marketing activities or wayfinding initiatives, pinpoint target markets, make connections with like-minded businesses, and identify funding opportunities.

Support for your destination can also extend to supporting your community in general. Many breweries have embraced their roles as natural community hubs to provide spaces for arts and culture activities, or events by community support or advocacy organizations. Not only do these activities contribute to the health of the community, they can contribute to the vitality of the visitor experience.

Recommendations:

• Build a strong relationship with your community’s DMO

• Build strong relationships with other businesses in your community’s Food

  Tourism Value Chain and identify opportunities for collaboration

• Find opportunities to support your community

Resources:

• Map your own community’s Food Tourism Value Chain and identifying potential collaborators using “Worksheet 1: The Food Tourism Value Chain” at the end of this document

• Identify and make contact with your community’s the Regional Tourism Organization to learn more about resources available in your area

4. Tell Your Story and Connect it to Place (Location)

As a craft brewer, you already understand the importance of marketing your product across various platforms, channels, and content types, including traditional and social media. One key element that can help tie your marketing initiatives together is understanding the role of storytelling in food and beverage tourism.

Visitors today are looking for deeper connections with the places they visit such as the local cultures, peoples, and landscapes that make destinations unique. Storytelling is one way to provide that deeper connection and allow visitors to feel like they know a place.

The 4 Ps of Storytelling

• Plot: Every good story brings the receiver on a journey and is made up of a beginning, middle, and end. When crafting your story, think about how you can take your visitors on a journey. This will often be the story of how a product is made, or it could be the history of your community, family, or property.

• Purpose: Be precise about what your story should mean to your visitors, and how your story connects to your product and the visitor experience. Stories are the thread that you use to tie all the elements of the experience together.

• People: Your story should be relatable. It should easily connect with facets of someone’s life. Your people - whether it’s you, your staff, your partners, your suppliers - make up a community. Weaving their stories into your own makes your story more robust and personal. It is also your most powerful tool for making a personal connection with your visitors.

• Place: Place is uniquely important in the world of tourism. This is where a tourist’s experience happens. Consider what is unique about your location and how it relates to the history and culture of your community.

Where and When to Tell Your Story

Storytelling can take many different forms and occur in many different places. The more storytelling touch points you have, the more likely that it will be remembered by your visitors. For example, storytelling can take place through your brand, your staff, on your decor, menu, or product labels, or online through your website and social media channels.

Online Storytelling vs. Onsite Storytelling

• Online storytelling is important for getting people to come to your experience. It takes place on digital channels like your website, social media channels, and external platforms like review services or partner websites.

• Onsite storytelling is an actual part of the experience that you provide to visitors. It is important for creating a bond between your visitors and your experience or product. Your online storytelling should help convey what people will be able to experience onsite.

Recommendations:

• Determine the aspects of your story and your community’s story that you want to share with your visitors

• Identify opportunities to incorporate your story into the visitor experience

Resources:

• “Worksheet 2: Crafting Your Story” at the end of this document

5. Manage Your Reputation Online and Onsite

Reputation management is essential to the success of any business offering a visitor experience, but is something that can often be overlooked or treated as an afterthought. Managing your reputation is done both onsite and online. Capturing feedback about your products and visitor experience is essential to managing both.

Online Reputation Management

Whether it is a tourist planning a trip to a destination, or someone in the community looking to visit a local business, reading online reviews is almost universal. Some research has shown that more than 93% of tourists will read reviews when planning to visit a destination and 98% read online reviews of local businesses.

Reviews have become more influential than ever in consumer decisions, and consumers are willing to pay more for a service from a company with higher reviews and ratings. While consumers are sensitive to reviews, they are also appreciative of responsiveness. Research also shows that consumers are likely to use a business that responds to its online reviews, and they are likely to leave their own reviews if their negative experience were turned into a positive one. Visitors to your brewery expect to see positive reviews and expect responsiveness to your reviews.

Consider the following questions:

• Do you have ownership of your business’s profiles on Google and TripAdvisor?

• How are you encouraging and collecting visitor feedback onsite and online?

• How often will both onsite and online feedback be reviewed and addressed?

• Who will monitor your website and social media accounts for visitor reviews of

  the experience?

•  Are they equipped to respond to online reviews, and to address any visitor

  complaints or negative feedback?

• How quickly are you responding to online reviews or customer inquiries?

Onsite reputation management

Reputation management onsite begins with how welcoming and accommodating you are to all types of visitors. A great example of this are breweries (over 3 dozen across Ontario) who have taken steps to be welcoming to the cycling community and work with organizations such as Ontario By Bike to be recognized as “bike friendly”. Another example are breweries who offer service in both official languages and promote this by participating in SÉO’s Route Champlain (there are 3 craft breweries on the trail).

When thinking about the target market you are focused on attracting, consider what other amenities or services would appeal to them and make them more likely to include your brewery on a stop during their travels. Several breweries in the province have EV charging stations as an example of an innovative way to attract the “high value and high values” consumer.

Recommendations:

• Take ownership of your business profile on Google and TripAdvisor

• Make asking visitors for feedback a part of your visitor experience

• Implement a process to ensure your online reviews are monitored and

  addressed

• Consider the types of services you can offers and the programs you could

  participate in that highlight your onsite experience

  Resources:

• Claim and regularly review and update your TripAdvisor and Google listings

6. Verify Your Values Through Certifications

Now more than ever, consumers are looking to support and spend their money at businesses that reflect their values. This extends to the visitor economy where tourists are keen to make supporting their values a part of their visitor experience. Businesses face a challenge when it comes to this, as tourists can be skeptical and demand transparency and accountability for what they purchase and support.

Businesses can overcome this challenge by verifying their values through certifications and promoting this online and onsite. In addition to verifying your values, these certifications and accreditations can provide you with useful resources to incorporate your values into your business, and help you demonstrate the steps you are taking to your visitors.

Programs to Work With

GreenStep is a national program that certifies tourism destinations and businesses taking steps to improve their sustainability performance. This certification is approved by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC).

Rainbow Registered is a national program delivered by the Canadian Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (CGLCC). It certifies that a business or organization meets a stringent set of standards to ensure LGBT+ customers feel safe, welcomed, and accepted.

Feast On® is a provincial program delivered by the Culinary Tourism Alliance (CTA). It certifies that a restaurant, experience or purveyor is supporting Ontario's farmers and makers, and using locally grown and raised ingredients. This includes operators serving Ontario craft beer on their menus!

Ontario Living Wage Network certifies that a business is paying a living wage to its employees.

Recommendations:

• Identify areas related to your core values where your business could benefit from additional resources and guidance

• Pinpoint the core values that you want to share with your visitors

• Achieve recognition by those certifying bodies whose programs are aligned

  with your values

Resources:

Beyond verification/certification/accreditation programs, there are many other organizations and resources available to make your visitor experience more inclusive and accessible:

•  Tourism Industry Association of Ontario: Accessible Tourism Resources

• OBIAA: Accessibility Tools and Reports

• WTTC: Inclusive & Accessible Travel Guidelines

• Access Now: Discover Accessible Places

• Tourism Industry Association of Ontario: Building Inclusive Tourism Resources

• Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion: Toolkits