South Australia’s distinctive approach to place branding was featured in the Place Brand Leaders Yearbook 2026, highlighting the state’s “Celebrate the Simple Pleasures” platform, its creative identity and the way the brand connects tourism with a broader sense of place. In this follow-up interview, Erik de Roos, Chief Marketing Officer at the South Australian Tourism Commission, reflects on what makes a positioning platform resonate internationally, why destination branding needs to connect with a broader place story, and how local creativity can turn a brand from a communications tool into an expression of place.
Erik also discusses the challenge smaller destinations face in an increasingly AI-mediated travel landscape, the importance of coherence across tourism and wider place positioning, and why South Australia’s opportunity lies not in competing with Australia’s biggest destinations, but in making its distinctive character more clearly understood.
South Australia’s “Celebrate the Simple Pleasures” platform is distinctive in global tourism for its restraint, creativity and strong sense of place. What have you learned about what makes a positioning platform actually resonate internationally, rather than simply look good in a campaign?
I think the biggest challenge we have tried to overcome is the shift from communications to behaviour. From the beginning, our ambition was not simply to create a platform that looked good in a campaign, but one that could become a guiding philosophy for how South Australia shows up across many different touchpoints.
For a positioning platform to resonate internationally, it needs to do more than communicate an idea. It needs to shape the way people experience the destination before they arrive, while they are planning, and through the stories they hear from others.
As a smaller destination, our international marketing budgets do not typically allow us to run extensive consumer-facing advertising campaigns in global markets. We rely heavily on the work Tourism Australia does to build awareness and interest in Australia overall. Our role is then to make sure South Australia becomes part of the Australian holiday consideration set once an international visitor moves from dreaming about Australia to actively planning where they might go.
That means much of our international activity is geared toward generating earned media through PR and influencing the travel trade. In practice, a lot of this happens through training, trade events, hosted visits and the way our industry presents itself to international partners.
Printed collateral and branding still have a role, but the bigger question is how we show up as a destination. The platform has to help our people, our operators and our partners tell a more consistent and distinctive South Australian story.
A simple example is how we showed up at Tourism Australia’s Australian Tourism Exchange this year. Rather than treating the brand as a logo on a stand, we created a presence that felt more reflective of place and more consistent with the Simple Pleasures philosophy.
At smaller trade events, we take the same approach by trying to show up in a distinctly South Australian way: generous, thoughtful, creative, relaxed and grounded in the experiences we want visitors to associate with the state.
So, for me, the lesson is that Simple Pleasures should not be viewed as an advertising line. It is most powerful when it acts as a philosophy that influences behaviour, product storytelling, partnerships and the way South Australia is experienced at every point of contact.
South Australia is primarily represented internationally through tourism, but its identity also has implications for investment, talent, trade, culture and the way South Australians see their own state. How do you think about the relationship between a destination brand and the broader positioning of a place?
This was a key consideration from the very beginning. South Australia had successfully introduced a new unifying brand mark in 2012, which subsequently achieved broad adoption and strong recognition across government and industry. What was missing, however, was a deeper and more unified narrative to sit behind the mark: a clearer articulation of what South Australia stands for, what makes it distinctive, and why that should matter to different audiences.
When we began developing the destination brand, we recognised that tourism could not answer that question on its own. A destination brand is one expression of a place, but it is not the whole story.
That is why we saw real value in working with other government departments and agencies to better understand the broader South Australian proposition. This led to the formation of a cross-government place brand working group, bringing together organisations with different audiences and mandates, but a shared interest in strengthening how South Australia is understood and represented.
Brand SA, as custodian of the South Australian place brand and visual identity, has since evolved the brand identity and published the unifying story to help guide government and industry.
The value of that work is not that every sector needs to say the same thing. Rather, it gives tourism, trade, investment, education, culture and talent attraction a shared foundation to build from, while still allowing each sector to tailor its message to the audiences it needs to influence.
The premise of “More of the Good” became an important underpinning proposition for the creative development of Simple Pleasures. It helped us focus on the qualities that feel true to South Australia: quality over quantity, balance over excess, generosity, ease, creativity, care for place, and a sense that life here offers more room to enjoy what really matters.
Put simply, our destination brand is a direct tourism expression of the broader South Australian place story. It translates that shared narrative into something more emotionally motivating for visitors, while still remaining connected to the way South Australia wants to be recognised more broadly as a place to visit, live, work, study, invest and belong.
One of the interesting aspects of the South Australian approach is the way local creativity, artists and cultural expression have become part of the brand itself. How important is it for a place positioning to be rooted in what people and organisations are actually doing, rather than simply in a communications narrative?
I think this is critically important, because place marketing only works when it is grounded in something real.
While our efforts are often focused on creating interest and demand among external audiences, the work also needs to feel recognisable and credible to the people who live here. If local audiences do not see themselves in the way the place is being represented, the brand risks becoming a communications exercise rather than a genuine expression of the state.
We have learned this through experience. In the past, there have been campaigns that were distinctive and effective in external markets because they challenged misperceptions or played with existing stereotypes. However, some of that work was not always embraced locally, because it did not reflect how South Australians saw themselves or wanted the state to be represented.
That tension matters. We ultimately want South Australians to feel proud of the way the state shows up in the world, because they are some of our most important advocates.
This is why local creativity, artists and cultural expression are so valuable to the Simple Pleasures platform. They help ensure the brand is not just something we say about South Australia, but something people can see, feel and experience.
When the work draws on what people and organisations are already doing, it becomes more authentic and more flexible. It gives us a stronger consumer promise for visitors, while also creating a platform local industry and community can believe in, contribute to and carry forward in their own way.
What does it take to stand out nowadays, in place branding and destination marketing?
There is so much good work happening across the world that I find it difficult to single out one person or organisation.
From a destination marketing perspective, however, I am increasingly interested in the smaller, lesser-known and more boutique destinations that have no choice but to work harder and smarter.
For well-established places, demand and recognition are often already significant issues to manage. In some cases, the challenge is not how to attract more visitors, but how to deal with the consequences of too much demand.
Overtourism has become a very real issue, and it is often self-reinforcing: more visitors create more stories, more social content, more media coverage and more fame, which in turn drives even greater visitation.
The emergence of AI is likely to intensify that dynamic. Large language models, AI-powered search tools and recommendation systems are informed by vast amounts of digital content, including websites, reviews, articles, videos, social media conversations, travel blogs and user-generated content.
Larger and more established destinations naturally generate far more of these signals because they have more visitors, more coverage and more online discussion. That creates the risk of a new kind of visibility gap, where the places that are already famous become even more likely to be recommended, while smaller destinations struggle to enter the answer at all.
For smaller and lesser-known destinations, the task is therefore no longer only to build awareness among potential visitors. It is also to build visibility, clarity and authority with the systems that increasingly help people make decisions.
In simple terms, we need to think about how our place story is understood and told by humans, and how it is interpreted, summarised and recommended by machines.
That is a significant shift, because AI does not experience a place emotionally. It recognises patterns, consistency, authority and the volume and quality of information available to it.
That means place branding will need to evolve. It will still be about emotion, identity, creativity and the lived reality of a place, but it will also need to become more deliberate about digital evidence.
The narrative needs to be distinctive enough for people to remember, but also structured and consistent enough for AI systems to understand. This places greater importance on clear storytelling across owned channels, strong third-party advocacy, quality media coverage, accurate partner content, structured information, reviews, itineraries and the everyday digital signals that help define what a destination is known for.
In the AI era, fame and fluency will matter in new ways: fame because recognised places are more likely to be surfaced, and fluency because a place that is clearly and consistently described is more likely to be correctly understood.
The relationship between tourism marketing and broader place positioning can be complicated, particularly when different organisations are responsible for different audiences and objectives. What have you learned about making that relationship work effectively in the South Australian context?
The biggest lesson is that place branding works best when it is treated as shared territory.
No single agency owns the story of South Australia, and no single campaign can carry every message about the state. But if we can agree on the deeper truth of the place, each sector can express it in a way that is relevant to its own audience.
In our case, the cross-government place brand work helped create that shared foundation. The broader “More of the Good” story gives South Australia a unifying narrative around quality, balance, belonging, purposeful progress and care for what makes the state special.
Simple Pleasures then becomes the tourism expression of that same truth. It is not the whole place brand, and nor should it be. Its role is to make the South Australian story meaningful and motivating for visitors.
What matters is not making every agency say the same thing. It is making sure the impression people form of South Australia is coherent.
An investor, student, skilled migrant and visitor all have different needs, but they should still recognise the same place underneath. When that happens, tourism marketing and broader place positioning become mutually reinforcing rather than competing agendas.
Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunity for South Australia to strengthen or evolve its international positioning? Is there something about the state that you think remains under-recognised or underdeveloped in its external reputation?
Internationally, South Australia suffers mostly from an awareness problem. Most international audiences do not think of Australia in distinct regions; they tend to recall and recognise some of Australia’s most iconic places and assets, such as the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney Harbour or Uluru.
With that, our job is to understand our role and position within the broader Australian tourism proposition.
Our clear strategic choice is not to compete head-on with some of the larger and more established destinations on the East Coast. South Australia is not Queensland, and Adelaide is not Sydney or Melbourne. But that is also exactly what gives it its charm.
I think the biggest opportunity is to position South Australia as the place where international visitors can experience a more intimate, grounded and human version of Australia.
We have many of the things people come to Australia for: extraordinary landscapes, wildlife, coast, wine, food, culture, Aboriginal heritage and a relaxed way of life. But they are experienced here with a different rhythm. They feel closer, less crowded, more personal and often more surprising.
That is where Simple Pleasures becomes strategically useful. It gives us a way to talk about South Australia without trying to manufacture scale or noise.
The platform allows us to lean into what is already true about the state: the ease of access, the quality of the experiences, the generosity of our people, the connection between city and region, and the sense of discovery that comes from finding something remarkable without feeling overwhelmed by it.
What remains under-recognised internationally is not necessarily one single asset, but the combination of assets and the way they come together.
Adelaide as a gateway is still underdeveloped in external reputation. It is a city with festivals, food, wine, culture and creativity, but also one that can connect you quickly to Kangaroo Island, the Barossa, the Flinders Ranges, the Murray River, the Limestone Coast and some of the most distinctive landscapes in the country.
So, the opportunity is not to make South Australia look bigger or louder than it is. It is to make the state more clearly understood as a compelling alternative within Australia: a place for travellers seeking richness without excess, discovery without crowds, and experiences that feel genuinely connected to place.
That feels both true to South Australia and increasingly relevant to the way many international travellers are thinking about travel.
Thank you, Erik.
Connect with Erik on LinkedIn or take a deep dive into Brand SA and the Simple Pleasures initiative.
For more perspectives from practitioners and thinkers shaping the future of place branding, explore our Place Brand Leaders interviews and the Place Brand Leaders Yearbook 2026.
