This pioneering research redefines the way we market leisure travel. Artificial segmentations based on personality differences offer weak foundations on which to build brand strategies. To deeply engage us, a brand must have a solid inner architecture deeply rooted in the fundamentals of humanity. Beneath all the phantasmagoria of global marketing communication, lies order and rhythm, the source code of our human behaviour. Summarising the results of our research, this presentation analyses the fundamental motives underpinning consumer behaviour towards leisure travel and proposes a way to build leisure travel brands that engage people at a profoundly human level. Our fundamental human motives are like bare patterns in any language. Successful brands infuse the pattern, fertilising the basic forms, in a unique and profoundly human way, enabling people to experience deep patterns that make them feel alive. There is a direct correlation between our fundamental human motives, the most direct way to engage people, and the level of sales and profit. The efficiency of communication budgets is maximised when the authentic codes of the brand germinate the deepest motives driving sales and profit in the category. Today we have no excuse for saying that “we waste half of our advertising budget but we don’t know which half”. Above all, by satisfying the most fundamental of our human motives the brand is deeply humanistic in that it offers holistic, universal experiences that no longer satisfy some individual needs but the needs of the species.

1. THE INTRINSICALLY
ENGAGING NARRATIVES™
OF LEISURE TRAVEL

2. Hi! My name is Constantinos
Pantidos and I believe that
companies could improve
people’s lives even more
effectively if they had
deeper human insight.

3. Using a multidisciplinary
approach, BRAND AVIATORS™
has captured and presents, for
the first time, the fundamental
human motives underpinning
our leisure travel buying
behaviour at the deepest levels
of their deployment …

4. … all the way from:
• their biological value
• to the neurosystems they engage
• to the cognitive operations and
psychological states they activate
• to the major social reinforcers they
cause and
• to the rich hierarchy of inherent
concepts they infuse into our
everyday life

5. This methodology helps
marketers develop
Intrinsically Engaging
Narratives™

6. The motives are presented in
order of increasing relative
importance in line with their
power to influence our
buying decisions

7. CARE: Why do we engage in
leisure travel? On an initial layer
of motivation, we travel to feel
we are being taken care of, to
feel appreciated. We want to be
served, our needs anticipated.

8. Being away from home is
disorienting. While travelling
we experience a temporary
existential imbalance. Travellers
are tired from the trip, from
changing their worlds. What we
are looking for above all else
when we are away from home
is the reassuring comfort of
shelter. The first demand on any
hospitality business is warmth.

9. INSPIRATION: On a deeper
layer, leisure travel creates
new combinations of
people and ideas of totally
different backgrounds. The
cross-cultural contacts
generate a new kind of
cultural self-consciousness.

10. Real creation demands
detachment. As exposure
to a different milieu may
act as a reference point
for re-evaluating one’s
own life, travel helps self-
definition.

11. PLEASURE: More
significantly, travel
fascinates us because it
promises an aesthetic
experience, seeking to
satisfy a mix of
pleasures.

12. At heart, travel is a
search for satisfaction
denied to us at home

13. PLAYFULNESS: On a
deeper layer of
motivation, leisure travel
promises a world of
spontaneity. The traveller
leaves behind everyday
commitments and
responsibilities and feels
really and truly alive.

14. Holidays mean a sparkling two weeks spent in a festive
atmosphere. In our mind, colourful travel is compared to
the grey, monotonous, tiring, sad, boring everyday life.

15. DISRUPTION: What drives
travel is its subversive,
destabilising capacity. What
really attracts us to it is the
fear of the unfamiliar.

16. As it is in the nature of travel to
put into question established
premises, travel may lead to a
confrontation with unsustainable
values of “home”

17. Travel involves border-crossing which
signifies a psychic disunification.
Travel is contradictive, splitting, it
separates us from our normal identity
and of all accoutrements of culture.

18. Travel cuts humans down to size, makes
miniscule the scale of human affairs

19. In many fairy tales citizens are
told that outside their village
they would be lost. It is feared
that beyond their frontiers they
will acquire knowledge and a
tendency to rebel. Primordially,
all villains are outside.

20. Travel is an unconscious desire
to destroy the present, to see
more clearly, from scratch

21. Leisure, itself, is the
consumption of time and
space. We appropriate the
world by consuming it.

22. To part is to die a little; every
departure is a rehearsal for
the ultimate one. Some even
cry a bit because we are
dying symbolically.

23. BALANCE: Going into deeper motivation,
travel sharpens judgment. As the stranger
does not share the basic assumptions the
locals share he has the freedom to be
objective.

24. Travel educates: To change
place is to clear our thoughts,
to open the mind to wider
perspectives, wider horizons
and wider thinking, eventually
leading to a better life balance

25. Stripped of our everyday routines,
we are forced to see the essential

26. INDULGENCE: On a yet more profound level of
motivation, travel is a convenient way to
demonstrate our freedom from necessity

27. The real rulers do not work. As it
marks a status above the common,
priority treatment is soothing.

28. EMPOWERMENT: On an even
deeper layer, travelling is a
form of conquest

29. Travel as a hero’s journey is a
basic pattern found in many
narratives around the world.
Travel, intrinsically, establishes an
expansionist mind-set. When
travelling, we feel that the whole
world belongs only to us.

30. CONNECTEDNESS: Travel is
communication. Communities
are formed in passage,
beginning in that sinking
feeling of sharing a common
fate.

31. Stripped away of all our
accessories to our essence, and
coming out of place and even
ourselves, in a multicultural
environment we are prone to
feel united with the world

32. As in every culture that
which is ultimately
manifested in the human
spirit, what we eventually
find through travel is
always ourselves, the
unique characteristics of
our species

33. We are fundamentally,
lonely but fearful of
intimacy. Tourism
conveniently comes to
offer the illusion of
companionship without
the promise of friendship.
Ultimately, vacation is
vacant time.

34. TRANSITION: Getting closer to
the core motivators, travel is a
rite of passage, a mode of
transcendence that literally
transports us, that carries us
away. The discoverer sees only a
fragment and then imagines the
rest in the act of appropriation.

35. By its very nature, travel involves
motion, flux, a medium of
perception that abstracts and
generalises form and relations out
of things and terms

36. Space transgression and rapid evanescence, produce a
series of continuously moving pictures

37. The most significant
transitions we experience
are written in our journeys.
Exposure to a different
milieu may cause a
revision of existing
perceptions of self, may
alter consciousness.

38. What leisure travel ultimately
promises is the potentiality of
loss of touch with reality.
Leisure travel transcends time
and space to create an
illusion of change.

39. SECURITY: Motion is primordially a search for
repose. Holidays are days of joy since one
has more freedom to be more fully oneself.

40. Travel can be the happiest,
most memorable days of
the year. Travel in our
unconscious symbolises the
eternal search for paradise
beyond the surrounding
chaos.

41. It is no accident that the idea of
a paradise in which people are
free and unconstrained and
everybody can be happy in
his/her own way at perpetual
rest, is one of the most
persistent ideas humans have
created

42. In our unconscious, the journey purifies. A series of
changes which happen in the character of the traveller,
and seen as strictly analogous to a cleansing are
probably what forms the perception of the purity of the
road. Stripped of defining relationships, surroundings
and daily routines brings rejuvenation.

43. Time stops when we travel. It
seems we need to go on a
journey to learn that paradise
could be found at home.

44. What we confirm
through vacations
is the rightfulness
of our normal life

45. EXPLORATION: On the innermost layer of human motivation,
travelling is one of the most convenient means we have
invented to satisfy our urge to seek.

46. Humans like the familiar most of all
because it brings security. But
quickly we become frustrated and
bored and we seek escape.

47. We are born travellers. We
are born with a drive to
explore. To put one foot in
front of the other is innate. The
step reduces the vastness of
the world into body
proportions. It is imperative
for many of us to know what
is beyond the next horizon.

48. Travel involves fluidity, vertigo.
The illusion of perpetual journey
appeals to our relentless mind.
Ultimately, we experience travel
as freedom.

49. The main motive for departure from
our home is to feel different, freer,
lighter. We go off on a journey to
free ourselves from all the obstacles
and our preoccupations; to leave
our selves behind. When we travel
we revert to the common identity of
a stranger. More or less consciously
we believe we can change or at
least find our self by moving place.

50. This map illustrates
the way some
leisure travel
brands are
positioned in the
consumers’ mind

51. Successful brands
coherently express
the fundamental
human motives
driving their
category

52. BRAND AVIATORS™ are trusted by some of the world’s
leading companies:

53. (Re)define your brand
through the human
fundamentals if you seek to:
• Deeply engage people
locally and across cultures
• Develop genuine concepts
that work year after year
after year
• Align all brand
communications under one
master idea
• Increase the ROI of all your
brand activities

54. My mission is to help clients
around the world build
brands that liberate the very
forces of life. Contact us now
for a free discovery audit by
clicking on the icon: