A veteran of the public relations community in Italy, and the go-to strategic consultancy for leading hospitality and development brands, Guido Bernardi Relazioni con la Stampa is a Milan-based agency with almost 40 years’ hands-on market experience. Offering a broad spectrum of tailored communications capabilities from destination launches and brand positioning campaigns to corporate IPO information dissemination, Guido and the team are an authority on reputation management.

In 1980, Costa Smeralda had just started to appear in the Italian press as the Aga Khan-funded project to develop a tourist destination in Northern Sardinia made headlines in the national media.

A challenging period for the Italian economy, with widespread political dissent abounding, the project was depicted in the media as a millionaire’s playground with the angle that it was exploiting what was largely an impoverished region, thus creating an extremely negative image.

At the height of the media backlash we took on Costa Smeralda as a client and, after carefully analysing the situation, decided that the campaign needed a new approach.

Our strategy was to focus on showing the impact of the investment on the Sardinian economy and we worked with Milan’s Bocconi University on a research analysis project.

This was then presented to the media via a series of press conferences, interviews and targeted releases; and made headlines once again, but from the angle that the project would kick-start inbound tourism for Sardinia and benefit the region’s economy as a whole.

A client since 1995, at the time Soneva Fushi was just one of a number of paradisiacal resorts in The Maldives, with no clear point of differentiation.

To the Italian market, The Maldives was simply a resort destination with crystal waters, beautiful beaches and relaxing escapism.

In order to create a point of difference for Soneva Fushi and drive business from Italy, we looked deeper into its raison d’être and chose to create a unique campaign based on its commitment to delivering ‘intelligent luxury’ with nature and sustainability its core philosophy.

This resonated with the market and the campaign became the anchor for the brand’s success in the inbound Italian market.

The Italian royal family, the House of Savoy dynasty, had been in exile since 1946 and, in 1998, the young Prince Emanuele Filiberto tasked us with restoring the family’s damaged reputation in order to facilitate his re-entry into the country as a successful businessman.

The media’s long and negative perception of the Savoy family had been propagated for decades, and our approach was to position Prince Emanuele not as a member of the royal household but as a dynamic, proactive and intelligent economist and businessman.

This was supported by the structured yet subtle inclusion of comment on the historical facts concerning the family’s departure from Italy over 50 years earlier; allowing him to clarify specific issues connected to political events of the time.

In 2002, the Savoy family returned to their homeland, and we received positive feedback both from the client and the market on the role we played in this landmark moment.