Alright, KLM, I took the bait. I saw the above email come into my inbox yesterday and I couldn’t help but be intrigued by such a bold claim. I have never really thought about Holland and cool in the same sentence. That same thought doubles for the Dutch. Nay for the Netherlands.
It’s not that I think Holland is not cool. It seems like a very nice place and I know many people who enjoy the town, but what did it do to become the original cool? That is a lot of responsibility to place on a nation, so I needed to see how they planned to live up to expectations.
Being inquisitive, I clicked through to their holland.com/cool website to see what it was all about.
The first thing I see? A box asking me to book a flight. Not so fast, Holland. You are trying to score a home run with me before we even have our first date. You still haven’t done anything to prove to me your coolness.
The next thing I see isn’t much better. Some guy yelling on a video and some text telling me what I call “it” – which I can only assume means cool – vintage, hip, indie. Three words I’ve never used in my life.
Eventually we get a few sentences about why Holland is the Original Cool, but by this point they have lost me. I don’t think Holland is cool anymore. I think it’s confusing.
The rest of the site isn’t much better. In fact, it’s just more confusion. I really have no idea what they are trying to get me to do by sending this email, and I am not any more likely to go to Holland as a result.
From a marketing perspective, this campaign is one of the poorest email marketing campaigns that I have seen in a long time. An un-targeted email that sends me to a confusing microsite with no explanation, call to action or purpose.
I can’t help but feel sorry for the marketing team who wasted so much time and shared marketing dollars on this message. I can imagine how things went down: Executives from the Holland tourism board, KLM and other organizations decided to work together on a campaign to bring people to Holland. Each partner brought several agenda items to the table that they wanted to have included on the site, and nothing was given a second thought. They simply built a website to throw every asset available onto the web. The result? A waste of time and a missed target.
How Could Holland be Cooler?
Show me the cool in Holland. Show me bigger photos to draw me in. Remind me of the great places I can visit within Holland, and the time of year I should go there.
Focus more on the 1-2 things that make you cool and stop assuming that we care about the others.
That’s what would be cool, Holland, if you focused less on saying you are cool and did more to show me that you are cool.