As a native of northern Germany, I really don't know if I have any right to pass judgement on the visual appearance of an Austrian resort town. On the other hand, I may be part of their target group. Hamburg has an astonishingly large ski club, and the winter holidays lure many folks to the Alps. Even I have been to Kitzbühel before. It's been a few years, unfortunately, but I still remember the city's logo. I found the dancing letters a bit too frivolous, but the symbol with a goat standing on a boulder was omnipresent, not only in the hotel and the city's literature, but all over town as well. And with good reason: The chamois goat-antelope appears in the city's coat of arms and was designed as a distinctive symbol by a painter named Alfons Walde in 1933. Not exactly a year people like to refer to, but still: How many logos and symbols are there today that have lasted for nearly 100 years? Exactly! 

Further research reveals a great deal about Alfons Walde, He was a distinctly joie de vivre artist from Kitzbühel, actually an architect, who liked to throw parties and who painted both landscapes and nudes – which somehow fits the cliché of a chic holiday resort. He also designed the station buildings for the Hahnenkammbahn cable car, and in his capacity as Kitzbühel's cultural advisor, created the logo as well as a baroque color code for the city's buildings. His paintings of the landscape and rural life were also effectively marketed as postcards and posters. From today's perspective, he would be called a marketing genius.

Disney-fying a vacation area

But now the chamois designed by Walde is a thing of the past. So is the logo, and for that matter the entire history. Because now there's a new brand identity, that has been presented in a three-minute film. After seeing it, I had to catch my breath. It only takes five seconds to grasp the concept, and strictly speaking, there's not much design to speak of: A red surface, a new logo with a simplified goat outline above a wordmark, and more animated sans-serif typography than you can shake a ski pole at. Underscored by a booming bassline, with a voice shouting “Like that!” and stuffed with mockups and lifestyle aesthetics, the whole thing seems over the top, like a conglomeration of clichés. The Disney-fication of an entire vacation region.  

Luxury needs uniqueness

Maybe people in Kitzbühel were bored with their own story, having told it so many times. Or they decided with alarm that it was no longer working and went into a panic – it's worth mentioning that they recorded a whopping 16% decline in overnight stays in 2023. And yet the place still has an impressive history. Kitzbühel has had a town charter since 1271, and the famous Stanglwirt Inn dates back to the year 1609. The first Hahnenkamm race on the Streif slope in took place in 1931, the same year the aforementioned design by Alfons Walde was introduced. All this is precisely the kind of history other places long for! It's a tale that has something magical about it, something intangible, that people are happy to pay a premium for. It's the kind of story you should be prominently emphasizing if you want to appeal to an affluent clientele, as Kitzbühel does. Without a doubt, even great stories have to be told differently in 2024 than ten years ago. The previous brand identity didn't live up to the city's premium aspirations. But the right response is not to melt away their unique identity like snow in the off-season. 

A few weeks ago at the Swiss Brand Convention in Zurich I caught a presentation about the new brand identity of the Swiss Tourism Association. It doesn't postulate a paradigm shift, but it moved me nonetheless. It also communicated important topics such as nature conservation and sustainability that cannot be conveyed with the trendy appearance of Kitzbühel's design. Moreover, I learned from that lecture that Switzerland is being inundated with tourists, and guests from Asia and the USA were willing to pay nearly any price. The brand appearance of another luxury ski resort, St. Moritz, is an example of how this positioning can be conveyed in a sophisticated and stylish way. They're still using the traditional wordmark and sun logo that also originated in the 1930s, but presenting them in a new, contemporary context.