This brand showcases the county’s world class tourism assets— Lake James, Catawba River, the iconic Blue Ridge Parkway, and Pisgah National Forest.
Content Creation
Video and photography was produced of each of the brand pillars and story themes, providing turn key content for both digital and outdoor display.
Marketing
Plan
A marketing and launch plan focused on key audience profiles including current visitors of Downtown Asheville and the surrounding area.
Destination by Design partnered with the McDowell County Tourism Development Authority to create “Blue Ridge Mountain Wonderland,” an outdoor-focused destination brand designed to attract a new wave of adventure-seekers to Western North Carolina. The identity showcases the county’s marquee natural assets, Lake James, the Catawba River, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Pisgah National Forest, backed by a full marketing and launch plan and a library of turnkey video and photography content across each brand pillar.
In North Carolina, community branding and destination marketing come together especially well for counties positioned near a major tourism draw, in this case, nearby Asheville. Mountain Wonderland reflects that strategy, targeting current visitors to Downtown Asheville and the surrounding area as a key audience profile, giving McDowell County a way to capture overflow visitor interest with its own distinct outdoor identity.
A destination brand works hardest when it’s built around a specific, identifiable audience rather than a generic visitor profile. Mountain Wonderland’s marketing plan does exactly that, focusing launch efforts on travelers already drawn to the broader Asheville region, then using McDowell County’s own natural assets, lakes, rivers, mountains, and national forest, to convert that regional traffic into visits to McDowell specifically.
Community branding is the process of developing a visual identity, brand strategy, and marketing content that captures a place’s character and communicates it to a defined visitor audience. For McDowell County, that meant a full brand system with primary and secondary logo lockups, photography and video production across every brand story theme, and a launch marketing plan built to introduce Blue Ridge Mountain Wonderland to adventure-seekers already exploring the region.
McDowell County sits in the foothills of western North Carolina, home to Lake James, the Catawba River, and a stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway, with Pisgah National Forest along its edges. Its proximity to Asheville positions it as a natural extension for visitors already drawn to the region’s mountains, giving Mountain Wonderland a built-in audience to target with its outdoor-forward brand.
