Let’s help you
plan your journey
Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Let’s help you
plan your journey
Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Soumen Bhowmick
A slow traveller, road trip enthusiast, Soumen travels to understand how places breathe beyond maps and itineraries. A road tripper at heart, he finds meaning in country roads, small conversations, changing landscapes, and the quiet stories that unfold between destinations. That same instinct now shapes how he designs journeys for organisations, MICE, brand drives, product launches and CSR initiatives built the same way: around people, place and what's real, not what's scripted.
Brands across India are being told that journeys are the new strategic brand initiative, which makes it sound like a format nobody was running five years ago. Dealer incentive trips, agent qualifier tours and factory visits have run in this country for decades and nobody called them strategy. What changed is not the travel but which department commissions it, what it is measured against, and whether the environment people are placed in was designed or merely booked.
Walk into a premium hotel in any Indian metro on a weekday and there is a good chance something corporate is running. A customer conference, a dealer meet, a leadership summit, an employee gathering. The venue is booked, the presentations are ready, the hospitality is arranged and a hundred people are working through a programme somebody spent six weeks planning. These formats still do real work. They launch products, communicate strategy, recognise performance and put dispersed people in the same room. None of that is going away. What is changing is that the organisations running them have started asking a harder question about what happens afterwards, and the answer keeps sending them somewhere the conference room cannot follow.
Because relationships have turned out to be the part of the business that is hardest to copy. Products get matched within a quarter, pricing gets matched within a week, and distribution advantages narrow every year as more of the market moves online.
Trust does not transfer that way. A dealer who has run your brand for eleven years and knows who to call at nine at night is not replaceable by a better margin. A customer community that talks to each other rather than only to you is not something a competitor can buy. That kind of relationship is slow to build and slow to lose, which is exactly what makes it worth putting on a strategy slide.
Once relationships are treated as an asset, the initiatives that build them stop being an events line and become a strategic brand initiative with an owner, a budget and an expectation attached. The format did not change. Its status inside the organisation did.
An incentive trip is a reward for performance already delivered. The top thirty dealers hit the number, the company sends them to Bangkok or Baku, and nobody expects the trip itself to change anything. It is a thank you with a boarding pass.
A journey is commissioned to change something. The brief is not who earned it but what needs to be different when everyone comes home. Sometimes that is a channel that has stopped talking to head office. Sometimes it is two departments that have never worked together. Sometimes it is a customer group that buys the product and feels nothing towards the company.
The aircraft can be the same. The hotel can be the same. What differs is whether anyone designed the days around an outcome, or simply filled them. Most of the disappointment we hear about corporate travel comes from a programme built to the second brief and judged against the first.
This is the change that explains the trend better than anything about travel itself. For most of the last three decades the money sat in an incentive or administration line, often under sales operations, sometimes under HR, and it was measured on cost and complaints.
It has moved. Marketing now commissions journeys as brand experience. HR commissions them as culture and leadership work. Channel and sales commission them as partner engagement. Communications commissions them when the outcome is coverage rather than relationships, which is how the car launch media drive became a recognised format in Indian automotive.
The consequence is that the people signing the cheque now have to report an outcome. A budget owner in marketing cannot defend a spend on satisfaction scores alone. That single reporting requirement has done more to change how these programmes are designed than any argument about the value of shared experience.
They move information efficiently, and there is no substitute for that. A national sales convention can put one message in front of eight hundred people in a morning, with the same emphasis, the same numbers and the same room to ask about it.
They also do things a journey does badly. Governance and planning need a table, a document and people who can leave at five. Product training needs repetition and a controlled environment. Recognition needs a stage, an audience and a photograph. Annual alignment needs everybody present at once, which is affordable in a hotel and rarely affordable on the road.
Any argument that treats the conference as obsolete is not worth listening to. The useful question is narrower: what is the conference structurally unable to produce, and does your objective sit inside that gap?
They stop working when the objective is a relationship rather than a transfer. Conferences are built to deliver content into a room, and relationships do not form by delivery.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has commissioned these programmes. The event runs flawlessly. Hospitality is praised, logistics hold, feedback forms come back strong and the internal debrief is a good one. Six weeks later nothing has moved. The same dealers are quiet, the same two departments are not speaking, the same customers renew or do not renew for the same reasons as last year.
Nothing went wrong. The format did what it was built to do. It was asked to do something else.
Because the parts nobody scheduled are the only parts where people are not performing their designation. Across the journeys we have designed, the moments participants describe afterwards are almost never the ones that took the most planning.
They talk about a four-hour road transfer where the conversation ran out of work and turned personal. A meal where somebody's regional food turned into somebody's childhood. An interaction with a village that was not on the itinerary. A small difficulty, a delay or a breakdown, where the seniority in the group briefly stopped mattering because two people had to solve something together.
None of this appears in an event report. All of it is where the relationship actually formed. That is the observation behind the Journey Environment Principle, which holds that interactions are shaped by the environment they happen in and not only by the people in them. Movement, unfamiliarity and shared inconvenience produce a different quality of conversation from a room with a projector in it.
The journey does not create trust. It creates conditions in which trust becomes more likely, which is a smaller claim and a more useful one. It is also why the road keeps recurring in this work, and why the argument for country roads over highways matters commercially as well as personally.
It runs alongside, and the distinction is worth being precise about because getting it wrong wastes the spend. The journey is a tool. The campaign is the cause the tool is being used for.
A brand that runs a drive because road trips are working for other brands has bought a tool without a job. A brand with something to say about durability, or terrain, or a network it wants people to see has a cause. Choosing a journey as the way to say it gives that cause a form that moves. The second one produces material worth publishing for years, which is the whole argument for turning campaigns into long-term brand assets rather than treating them as spend that expires.
Campaigns create awareness. Journeys create the relationships and the raw material that awareness alone cannot. Most brands need both and most confuse them at the briefing stage.
Start with the relationship you want to be different, not with the format. If the objective is knowledge transfer, governance, compliance or operational planning, book a room and do it well. If the objective involves trust, candour, cross-functional collaboration or cultural alignment, the room is working against you and a designed environment is worth the cost.
Then check whether you actually know what is happening in the environment you have chosen. This sounds obvious and is where most programmes quietly fail. A brand that puts a group into a festival because the dates look good may not know what it has booked. The Garo Wangala festival exists in two forms under one name. The Hundred Drums event at Asanang was created under state patronage in 1976 and supplies almost every photograph of Wangala in circulation. Village Wangala in a Songsarek village is a religious act, and it moves anywhere between September and December according to that village. Book the wrong one and the group has attended a performance while the brief said immersion.
Choosing an environment means knowing what is in it. Destination choice for a corporate group is a different discipline from destination choice for a holiday. It is also why the question of which Indian destinations suit a corporate offsite has an answer that changes with the objective.
Three tests apply. The relationship has to be long rather than one-off. The other party has to have a real choice about staying. And the person in front of you has to hold discretion over something that matters.
That points to a consistent set. Dealer and channel networks, where switching is possible and loyalty is worth years of margin. Leadership groups, where the working relationships determine how fast decisions move. Customer communities in categories people identify with, which is why automotive, outdoor and premium consumer brands got here first. Distributors and partners in businesses where a single relationship carries a large share of revenue.
It points away from others. High-volume, low-involvement transactions do not justify the cost. Neither does a stakeholder group with no discretion. And a brand whose relationship problem is really a product problem will find that a very good journey makes the underlying issue clearer rather than smaller.
Media and creators are a separate case with its own mechanics, since the output there is published work rather than a private relationship. That is a different brief and produces a different kind of return, covered in how brand road trips generate organic media coverage.
Not on the last day. Attendance, satisfaction and execution quality are hygiene, and a programme can score well on all three while producing nothing.
The measures that matter are all lagging. Did people keep talking to each other without the company in the middle. Did the group chat survive past the second week. Did anyone from the journey call anyone else from the journey about something unrelated to it. Did dealers who went behave differently from dealers who did not, in orders, in escalations, in how they respond when something goes wrong. Did participants start explaining the brand to other people unprompted.
These take weeks to become visible and months to become countable. That is inconvenient for a marketing calendar and it is the honest position. A brand that needs the number by the end of the quarter should not commission a journey, because it will judge it on the wrong evidence and conclude the format failed.
The broader case for treating travel as something the organisation owes attention to, rather than something it buys, sits in care-based travel.
Four situations, and all four are common enough to be worth naming.
The brand whose real problem is price or product. A journey will not fix a proposition, and the participants will be polite about it.
The brand with nobody to carry the follow-through. If no individual owns what happens in the weeks after everyone lands, the programme ends when the flight does. That is why planning a corporate retreat people actually remember turns out to be mostly a question about the weeks afterwards.
The brand that is sending people as a reward and describing it internally as strategy. Participants read the difference immediately and behave accordingly, and the mismatch damages the credibility of the next programme.
The brand that has already decided the destination. When the location is fixed before the objective is written, the objective ends up being reverse-engineered to fit a place somebody liked, and every design decision after that is downstream of an accident.
A journey is a large, visible, expensive commitment that puts senior people in unfamiliar conditions for several days. It is worth doing when the relationship it targets is worth more than the programme costs, and worth declining when it is not. The organisations getting the most out of this are the ones willing to say no to it. The journeys we run are where the argument stops being a framework and becomes a route.
A strategic brand journey is a designed experience commissioned to change a specific relationship between an organisation and its customers, dealers, partners or employees. The destination, pace, group composition and unstructured time are all chosen against that objective rather than against comfort or cost alone. The journey is the method. The relationship is the point.
Experiential marketing is built to create a memorable encounter between a consumer and a brand, usually at scale and usually measured on reach and engagement. A brand journey works on a much smaller group and is measured on what happens between the participants afterwards. One is designed to be witnessed. The other is designed to be lived through.
They overlap but the intent differs. An offsite or retreat usually moves an existing group out of the office to do work it could technically do inside it, with the change of setting as support. A brand journey treats the movement itself as the mechanism, and often includes people who do not work together at all, such as dealers, customers or partners.
Customers rarely become loyal through transactions alone, and advertising can create preference without creating attachment. A journey puts a customer in extended, unstructured contact with the brand and with other customers, which produces conversations that a campaign has no way to start. What tends to survive afterwards is the relationship with the other participants, and the brand becomes the reason it exists.
B2B is often the stronger case. Deal cycles are long, individual relationships carry a large share of revenue, and the buyer has discretion that advertising cannot reach. A partner or distributor who has spent four days with your leadership team behaves differently in a difficult quarter, and that difference is measurable in renewals and escalations.
Yes, and this is where Indian brands have the most immediate opportunity. Most dealer travel is still structured as reward, which means it is designed for enjoyment and not for the channel relationship. A dealer journey designed against an objective creates conversations between dealers, which is where loyalty and knowledge exchange actually live. It also reaches the dealers who missed the number and most need including.
They work well when the objective is how people work together rather than what they know. Shared movement and unfamiliar conditions expose working styles that an office never surfaces, and they interrupt the hierarchy long enough for candour to be possible. They are a poor substitute for training, structured feedback or anything that needs to be repeated.
Automotive is furthest ahead, since the product and the format are the same thing. Financial services, insurance and pharmaceuticals have long-standing channel travel that is now being redesigned around outcomes. Consumer durables, outdoor and premium lifestyle brands are active, and technology companies increasingly use journeys for leadership and partner work.
No, and treating travel as the default is a good way to waste money. The useful question is what environment supports the relationship you are trying to build. Sometimes that is a boardroom, sometimes a workshop, sometimes a factory floor. It becomes a journey when the objective needs unstructured time and shared unfamiliarity, which a room cannot supply.
Because execution quality and relationship outcomes are separate things, and most events are optimised for the first. A perfectly delivered programme still runs on a schedule that leaves no unstructured time, keeps people in their designations and ends the moment the last session does. Nothing was done badly. The format was asked for something it is not built to produce.
Longer than a quarter and shorter than a year in most cases. The early signal is behavioural and appears within weeks, in who is talking to whom and whether the contact continues without the company arranging it. Commercial effects in orders, renewals or escalations usually take a few months to separate from normal variation.