It is said that there is nothing more powerful than a good story told with talent, and this is well known to marketers who apply these elements to the marketing of services or products. In March, a group of students from the Faculty of Business, studying Applied Communication and Tourism and Hotel Management, expanded their knowledge on this topic by taking part in an intensive Storytelling programme at the Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences in Latvia together with the Finnish LAB University of Applied Sciences.

A total of 35 tourism and communication students took part in this Norplus Newelra project exchange programme. The week-long activities gave them the opportunity to follow an intensive course on storytelling, marketing principles and their application in the tourism industry.

Divided into interdisciplinary, international teams, the students aimed to find out how to attract tourists to remote, rural areas using a storytelling approach. The host, Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, tasked the teams with developing a marketing plan to attract Estonian tourists to the Gauja National Park.

The intensive programme culminated in a presentation of the ideas: one of the seven teams was selected as the team with the best marketing plan. The teams were evaluated according to the following evaluation criteria: use of storytelling elements, story narrative, the relevance of the proposal to the needs of the target segment, service design, creativity, sustainability and feasibility, marketing logic.

Viktorija Navickienė, one of the representatives of Kaunas University of Applied Sciences, the Head of the Communication Department of the Faculty of Business, who accompanied the students, says that this meeting is a reflection of the long-standing partnership between Kaunas, Vidzeme and the LAB Universities of Applied Sciences, in the framework of the Nordplus project activities. “By implementing these projects and continuing our friendship with these higher education institutions, students not only broaden their field of knowledge at the international level but also acquire theoretical and practical knowledge more efficiently, in other words, they develop soft skills that help them acquire hard skills”, says V. Navickienė.

The storytelling intensive programme is part of the activities of the Nordplus project Nordic Network For Creating New Earnings Logistics In Rural Areas (NEWELRA 2020). The overall goal of the network is to create a synergy of HEIs for facilitating social and economic development of rural areas by supporting the existing and creating new earning logics in the regions. In the long term perspective of the project, with input from all partner institutions, the handbook on rural entrepreneurship in the Baltics and the Nordics should see the light of day.