Initiative

A chapter closed on 75 years of a forestry beating heart in McBride BC in 2017 with a fire that destroyed the last vestige of the industry – the BKB Cedar Manufacturing plant. Tourism is a core element of this transition given McBride’s natural assets…some of BCs most rugged high mountain back-country and an existing reputation as a snowmobiling destination.

Rynic engaged with the Village of McBride for 18 months from 2023 through 2025 to animate the village’s “Activate Tourism McBride” initiative via tourism product development and marketing.

A key tourism challenge is the natural tendency to want to promote anything and everything. Unfortunately, this isn’t aligned with visitors who will visit a “best of” and have a world of choice. To address this challenge, the Activate initiative focused on product specificity and differentiation. Enabled by a community engagement process, the initiative identified and work on tourism product development diversification in three key product experiences: 1) Mainstreet (to better capture Yellowhead Highway traffic – for an hour to a day to overnight); 2) Equestrian; and 3) Water. These product experiences represent diversification beyond McBride’s tourism claim to fame – snowmobiling – and offer opportunity to grow visitation and in-community tourism spending with direct benefit to Village of McBride businesses and residents. This work included significant interaction with community decision makers and tourism operators/interests to enhance capacity to grow the tourism industry – including a Tourism Summit that attracted almost 10% of the population of McBride to participate in learning and product development action planning.

Key Activate Tourism McBride outputs included tourism product selection, a Tourism Product Development Strategy on a page, and articulation of tourism product development pathways for each identified product experience.

With creation of a new tourism website (not affiliated with Rynic), a symbiotic 2025 MRDT (hotel tax) marketing contract established a bridge between product development and marketing, with completion of key tourism marketing building blocks including a campaign brand (McBride Alive), social media presence and anchor posts, photography library, and an Adventure Guide.

The Adventure Guide – the community’s first-ever tourism publication – represented a culmination of product selection and development to date, and demonstration of key tourism development and marketing principles.

What makes this Guide different than typical? 1) “Within 20 minutes” Product (Snowmobiling, Equestrian, Water, Mountain Biking, Hiking, Winter, Mainstreet) vs. “Discover Us” Focus; 2) a “McBride Alive” Marketing Campaign that celebrates visceral happiness to be found in some of BC’s best high mountain backcountry; 3) Local stories-based Storytelling that works to connect visitor experience with McBride’s secret sauce – its people; 4) Tourism Entrepreneurship invitation; 5) Product-Specific Photography with focus on human experiences in faces, hands, feet, and objects vs simply mountains, water, and trees; 6) Conversational Communications Tone; 7) Web Linking for Logistics Planning.

The Adventure Guide offers a guidepost for other tourism communities in three key ways: 1) Focus on value proposition-based tourism product vs generality of “discover us”; 2) Direct alignment of value proposition-based product with imagery; and 3) Use of storytelling as a key means to both engage prospective tourists, and local residents (pride/salesmanship) in tourism product development and marketing. “Personalization” of tourism experiences that goes beyond “mountains, water, and trees” marketing to form connectivity with people is a key tourism product development and marketing opportunity/gap in BC communities, and provincially.

A distinctive marketing campaign – McBride Alive – embraces McBride’s core high mountain backcountry value proposition: “Embrace every moment with energy, purpose, and connection. Grow, adapt, and pursue vitality to experience life fully. Feel the pulse of possibility…to thrive in every opportunity…to spark change within yourself and the world around you.”  The campaign features close-cropped faces, hands, legs, and objects to nurture strong connection to the “humanity of tourism” with understanding that most visitors seek, but often fail to find, the authenticity to be found in interaction with locals. This approach is a distinct divergence from typical tourism marketing focused on mountains, water, and trees that truthfully doesn’t distinguish one BC community from another. What will distinguish McBride’s tourism product is its “human nature”.