Last week, we shared how excited we are that Margaritaville’s iconic brand has joined the MediaValet family. We often say that we’re inspired by the creativity and innovation of our customers and their marketing strategy. Margaritaville is a company that captures the hearts and minds of millions of customers and continues to engage them every day through a brilliant marketing strategy that leverages impactful visual experiences and keeps those touchpoints consistent across every single channel.

Here, we share how Margaritaville leverages DAM to tell its story.

Margaritaville’s Lifestyle Brand

As a lifestyle brand dedicated to bringing singer and songwriter Jimmy Buffett’s carefree spirit alive for vacationers across the globe, Margaritaville takes an innovative approach to marketing.

The company heavily uses rich media images and pairs those images with fun and enticing captions to inspire the desire to stay at their hassle-free tropical resorts, eat at their award-winning dining establishments, and, when not on vacation, continue wearing all of the Margaritaville fashion products in memory of good times and relaxation with a little tequila, salt, and lime.

Where is Margaritaville?

When this company explains the answer to the question: “Where is Margaritaville,” they always say it with an image:

“Where is Margaritaville? It’s in the tropics somewhere between the Port of Indecision and Southeast of Disorder, but no parallels of latitude or longitude mark the spot exactly. You don’t have to be a navigator to get there. Palm trees provide camouflage, ocean breezes bring seaplanes and sailboats, tourists, and travelers. Passports are not required. Island music rules. No waiting lines for anything. There is a beach and a thatched roof bar perched on the edge of the turquoise sea where you can always find a bar stool. There are lots of lies and loads of stories. It’s a comical concoction that blends together like tequila, salt, and limes. Where is Margaritaville? It’s in your mind.”

At all touchpoints, Margaritaville doesn’t just tell you, they show you that you can experience a tropical way of life anywhere on the planet because Margaritaville is a state of mind.

Building a dream of a tropical vacation with visuals

Margaritaville’s team members are experts at tapping into their audience’s desire to escape to a tropical paradise. Their photos resemble the ones you would see from one of your photographer friends that just came back from a great vacation: stunning beaches, sunsets, white sands, palm fronds – all with just enough character to show what a fun time they had.

Margaritaville’s close-up of a palm frond gets paired with a witty caption on social media: “We get by with a little help from our fronds.”

This promise of a fun, carefree spirit, and quick wit are a huge part of Margaritaville’s culture, which is consistently reflected through their brand. When you are on vacation at one of Margaritaville’s resorts or even having drinks at one of their restaurants, you know you will be a part of a party paradise with like-minded people that are there to enjoy every moment. The company’s collection of iconic photos, videos, and marketing materials that evolved and grew over the last 30 years represents the depth of value held in Margaritaville’s brand. Investing in a technology that would help the team leverage that value to its full potential made a lot of sense.

One brand voice across multiple lines of business

As Margaritaville grew from a retail store and single restaurant in Key West into a global lifestyle company that includes consumer products, restaurants, retail shops, resorts, casinos, vacation ownership properties, a national radio station on SiriusXM and more, the marketing team needed to find scalable ways to grow and leverage their asset collection and speak in consistent voice across all product lines and digital channels. Not only did the team do an incredible amount of work organizing and structuring their extensive collection inside MediaValet, but they’ve also created a solid foundation for scaling their content and visual strategies. This innovation will allow them to make the most of existing assets and enable the graphics team to focus on creating new brand experiences rather than spending our searching and resizing existing items.

Collaborating across the world

Using all their photos, videos, and other digital asset files stored in a single DAM solution, Margaritaville has created a central library of marketing and branding assets. With this central library, every single team across the world – whether it’s a branded resort, casino, restaurant, brewery, or any other Margaritaville business – has instant access to all approved images, videos, audio, and any other type of marketing or advertising file. The crucial word here is “approved,” which means that administrators can set up permissions for specific teams to have access to assets and categories they need for their day-to-day work. This reduces the risk of using the wrong logo, an image with expired rights, or any outdated marketing material. The whole Margaritaville team can share collections of images or collaborate on projects while tracking versions and updates- all in real-time even with the largest files imaginable.

Keeping it easy and fun

Having a fun and easy-going attitude is not just part of the brand messaging for Margaritaville, but is also a part of day-to-day life and a team’s approach to doing business. And of course, the system that would be used by employees and partners would have to be simple to use and combined with a DAM partner ready to have fun and share a friendly attitude at every turn.

One of the greatest benefits of a cloud-based DAM solution focused on user experience is an easy-to-use interface that does not require high levels of technical skill to master. Employees and partners who require access to Margaritaville’s digital asset library are specialists in hospitality or food service in their local communities. They need quick, easy, and straightforward access to applicable files. DAM provides that to them and thus builds fun team synergies into marketing workflow processes.

With their cloud-based digital asset management solution, Margaritaville has created an online resource accessible from any web browser that affiliated businesses across the world can search, download and share.

Speaking of margaritas and things we eat, get more details on DAM for the food & beverage industry and learn easy tricks and tips for using photos to grow a restaurant in How DAM Can Bring Home the Bacon for Food & Beverage.