🌑🔥 How Dark Mofo increased tourism visitation in Tasmania by 47%

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🌚 Hello and happy darkest day of the year to our North American readers. It’s only uphill from here.

Today’s brand is Dark Mofo: a winter solstice festival held in Tasmania. Over 10 years they have:

• Increased visitation to Tasmania by 47%

• Created a sell-out public nude swim

• Built a world-renowned arts festival held over the coldest, darkest days of the year a 2 hour plane ride from the mainland

• Marketed death, resurrection, renewal as themes in their marketing strategy

• Made open fires, flashing lights, and a host of occupational health and safety hazards a hallmark of their brand

What?!

Yes.

You’ll love this if you’re: an arts institution, a seasonal brand (I’m looking at you, winter sports), a brand tackling a taboo topic, or just really into solstice 🌚

Most brands stray away from taboo topics: sex, death, paganism. Not Dark Mofo.

Most cultural institutions fall into this trap. If there’s one takeaway from this post: it’s that trying to appeal to everyone - say it with me - is the fast track to appealing to no one. Dark Mofo isn’t without its (heaping) share of controversy, but it’s built a heck of a festival. It gives us some important lessons about positioning, community engagement, and the arts category.

Dark Mofo is a festival that shouldn’t work - but it does.

Let’s venture to the dark side of the moon and find out why 👇

What is Dark Mofo?

**pulls on black mockneck**

Dark Mofo is, in its own words, “a midwinter festival in Hobart that celebrates the dark through large-scale public art, food, music, fire, light and noise.”

The interesting thing about Dark Mofo is that the festival’s very existence has a purpose rooted in making art accessible. What’s even more interesting is that they chose to do it by putting ‘challenging’ (art curator speak for controversial) work in front of audiences.

So what’s the role of brand in all of this?

Remember: all brands have jobs. Dark Mofo’s is to increase visitation to Mona, Tasmania’s modern art museum during the winter months.

Keep this in mind. There will be a quiz later.

Dark Mofo’s brand positioning: celebrate the dark

Strategy is using your resources - or your strengths - to build a plan to win.

What strengths does Tasmania, and MONA have that no one else does?

• Shortest, darkest day of the year in the country

• A world class private modern art museum

• Dark history: Tassie was the British Empire’s gulag: the island was populated with convicts, the highest affiliation of paganism in Australia, and home to a war waged and lost by indigenous Tasmanians against the British colonists that inspired H.G. Wells to write War of the Worlds

Brand strategy can play up strengths and downplay weaknesses, but it cannot hide the truth. And the truth is: Dark Mofo is not an arts festival. It’s a spectacle designed to poke at the shibboleths of art. Far flung museum? Use marketing as a call to the darkness. Dark history? Tackle it head on with challenging art. Longest, darkest day of the year? Commission large scale light installations, open fires, and turn local pubs into an extension of the festival, inviting visitors in from the cold.

The stronger your positioning, the less work you have to do to sell yourself.

One exercise I tend to do when I’m exploring a new category is to look at the category conventions. Let’s play modern art bingo 🎲

Dark Mofo’s: celebrate the dark.

Dark Mofo embody a pagan winter solstice festival and execute on it masterfully, building a moat that no one else could hope to replicate.

Remember: positioning is everything. You can’t be everything to everyone: better to commit to your positioning and then execute the heck out of it.

3 ways Dark Mofo lead with a dark point of view

1️⃣ Build a dark world with yearly theme drops

Dark Mofo aren’t constrained by re-using exactly the same design elements each year. Instead, they use the color red and the cross to anchor their identity, but every year they drop a new sub-theme:

• 2017 - silence

• 2018 - time

• 2019 - forest

• 2020 - death

• 2021 - dark night of the soul

• 2022 - resurrection

Dark Mofo does something most brands can only dream of: world building. More often used in the realms of gaming and fiction, world building is the practice of imagining, designing and implementing a story. As a festival, Dark Mofo actually constructs that world & sells tickets to it.

2️⃣ Programming that pushes the boundaries of participatory, immersive art

Where does art live? At Dark Mofo it’s everywhere: case in point - Siren Song, a dawn and dusk call delivered by a helicopter and 450 speakers placed throughout the city. Dark Mofo doesn’t just challenge the ‘where’, but also the what’ 👇

Nude choirs. Bacchanalian feasts. River boat rides playing guided meditations on how bodies decay if they are lost at sea. Dark Mofo’s programming brief is a natural extension of their brand: celebrating darkness.

Most publicly funded museums and festivals lean towards family-friendly fare, while MONA has been unabashedly dark from day one. It makes Dark Mofo stand out like a bare bum in Carnegie hall.

3️⃣ Paint the town red: Open sourced branding for maximum community engagement

Walking around Hobart in June, it feels like the whole town has Dark Mofo fever. Local businesses swap in red light bulbs to their storefronts & whip up red and Dark Mofo themed cocktails. It feels like everyone’s part of the festival brief.

How do they do it? Dark Mofo incent businesses to register by offering hefty prizes to customers of participating businesses.

TLDR: Dark Mofo lead from what they stand for (celebrate the dark) to how they show up in the world (programming that pushes boundaries) to how they invite participation.

So how’s it working out?

The Bottom Line

I refer back to our brief: what’s Dark Mofo’s job?

(Told you there’d be a quiz).

Dark Mofo’s job: increase visitation to Mona during the winter months.

How’d they do? Well, between 2012 and 2023:

• 👯‍♀️ Total visitors increased from 855,200 to 1.262M (+47%)

• 🏨 Visitor nights increased from 7.86M to 12.14M (+54%)

• 💸 Visitor expenditure increased from $1.372 to $3.642 (+165%)

Source: Tourism Tasmania.

With interstate ticket buyers making up 65% of attendees in 2023, Dark Mofo has pulled off the Bilbao effect, so named for the transformation the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim had on the city of Bilbao. Tourism in Tasmania has boomed, notably in it’s darkest, coldest, most unpleasant season.

Regardless of your position on public nudity (or anything else Dark Mofo does), I think it’s safe to say the brief was nailed.

YOUR TURN

Tactics to love & learn from

🎯To attract an audience, start with vision and design for the few. Designing for the aggregate doesn’t make die-hard fans. Commit and put all your energy into designing for a few: not trying to please everyone. You won’t.

🕳️ Go dark when you’re in the off season - but bring the 🔥 when you’re on. Dark Mofo don’t communicate year round. I counted the emails I received from them: 8 in 2022, 13 in 2023. They’re not trying to email me every day, but when they do? It is so intriguing I open every email.

👬 Decentralized execution to build a true festival experience. Dark Mofo’s strength: instead of whacking up identical festival flags all over the city & calling it a day, they’ve involved everyone from the bottle-shop down the road to the Hobart airport. Invite participation amongst partners by briefing them on the vision of festival experience & then getting out of their way.

Next week: It’s Christmas break & the out of office goes on today! See you in the new year.

👋 Til next year,

Amanda