A lighthouse is useful until it becomes a blind spot. Nova Scotia has several images that perform the same trick: Peggy's Cove granite, a fishing village, an Atlantic horizon pulled taut beneath a huge sky. They make the province recognizable in an instant. They can also leave a traveller with the mistaken feeling that the whole place has already been seen.
Joann Fitzgerald works inside that tension. As Chief Marketing Officer of Tourism Nova Scotia, she is responsible for destination marketing and sales strategies designed to turn a place people know into a trip they actually book. The distinction is her raw material. Recognition lives at the top of the funnel. Consideration is where an economy begins to feel it.
Her most useful public explanation of the problem came early in her tenure. Campaign research showed that the province had awareness among target travellers, yet consideration lagged because some people doubted there was enough to justify a flight or drive. The creative answer was not to discard the icons. It was to place another Nova Scotia beside them: surfing, vineyards, beaches, food, music and experiences that stretched well past the familiar postcard.
The destination marketer's problem
The product is a province
Fitzgerald arrived at Tourism Nova Scotia in January 2017, but tourism was not the beginning of her marketing education. Her career ran through Unilever, Pepsi-QTG, Kruger Products, Sobeys and Cadbury. Those are products with shelves, packages, prices and distribution systems. A province is messier. No chief marketing officer controls every room, meal, road, wave, welcome or rainy Tuesday that becomes part of a visitor's memory.
Between consumer brands and destination marketing, she helped guide marketing for Memorial University's Grenfell Campus in Newfoundland, her home province. In 2013 she moved back to Nova Scotia and became Johnson Insurance's Atlantic Head of Marketing. The route looks less like a tourism ladder than a series of lessons in how people decide: what to eat, where to study, whom to trust and, eventually, where to spend a week of scarce vacation.
“A brand is a collection of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and experiences.”Joann Fitzgerald, explaining destination branding
That definition does more work than a logo ever could. A destination brand has to gather hundreds of independent encounters into one expectation sturdy enough to support a purchase. The promise cannot be manufactured from nothing. Fitzgerald has described the work underneath it: research, stakeholder consultation, focus groups and a clear reading of what visitors already feel.
A strategy firm enough to bend
In 2020, the available travel market collapsed inward. Tourism Nova Scotia had been preparing to advertise outside the region. Restrictions arrived just before launch, allowing the team to redirect its attention to Nova Scotians and, as movement reopened, Atlantic Canadians. The new assignment was intimate: persuade residents that their own backyard contained more than the two or three places they already loved.
This was less a grand reinvention than a disciplined change of audience. The province remained the product. The emotional frame shifted from faraway discovery to rediscovery. In one local campaign, the familiar pull of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” helped carry that feeling. Fitzgerald called the job getting people “out, and booking, and travelling within the province.” It was plain language for an urgent economic function.
The same practical instinct appeared in Work From Nova Scotia. Remote work made the boundary between visitor and resident unusually porous, so the campaign invited Canadians to imagine the province not only as a holiday but as a place to live and work. Fitzgerald's phrase for the moment was making lemonade from lemons. The website registered 531,000 engaged users during the period covered publicly, evidence that a tourism organization's skills could travel beyond a conventional vacation brief.
“You can find the time to do the things you really want to do.”
The life around the title
The executive biography is polished by design. Fitzgerald's first-person account is more useful because it includes the crowded edges. In 2019, she had accepted an invitation to teach marketing to Dalhousie MBA students while holding her day job, serving on the Nova Scotia Talent Trust board, attending a weekly pottery class and training for her first beginner triathlon. She was unsure how the new commitment would fit. She took it anyway.
She borrowed an image from a book she had read: walk through the door of opportunity. Then she added her own joke, wondering whether it would prove to be a door or a ledge. The line reveals a helpful combination. Ambition is present, but so is the ability to look sideways at it.
Her account of influence begins at home. Her mother worked as a hairdresser for more than 40 years, running a business on her own terms. Fitzgerald saw independence and the ability to make things happen. Her father spent more than 40 years with one company. She saw excitement, frustration and an uncompromising work ethic. Their example gave her the confidence to make decisions such as leaving a full-time job for graduate school.
- Honesty
- Integrity
- Humility
- Respect
- Kindness
These are the five principles Fitzgerald says she lives by. Their importance, in her telling, is relational. They make it possible to connect, build trust and grow. She also speaks directly about conflict: do not let a difficult working relationship fester, communicate clearly, and shape the message so the other person can actually hear it. A recommendation on her professional profile describes the same pattern from outside: sharp strategy, candour, hard work and an ability to bring stakeholders along.
Her work with the Nova Scotia Talent Trust put those instincts into a different setting. Fitzgerald served on the board, led its Development Committee for four years and helped initiate new brand colours and a logo before becoming chair in June 2020. The organization supports emerging Nova Scotian artists, so the assignment joined marketing craft with cultural stewardship. It also made partnership tangible: the brand work was not an advertising finish applied at the end, but part of how a small organization clarified its identity and carried its mission into public view.
Growth in five-year chapters
Fitzgerald does not point to one dramatic stage of professional growth. She prefers a five-year block, long enough to ask what she learned, what she accomplished and whether either matched the expectation she carried in. Each role is something to “live in” for a while. New industries, people, processes and responsibilities force the next set of skills.
- Consumer brandsMarketing work across Unilever, Pepsi-QTG, Kruger Products, Sobeys and Cadbury.
- NewfoundlandGuided marketing for Memorial University's Grenfell Campus.
- 2013Returned to Nova Scotia to lead Atlantic marketing for Johnson Insurance.
- 2017Joined Tourism Nova Scotia as Chief Marketing Officer.
- 2020Became board chair of the Nova Scotia Talent Trust after helping with its brand development.
- 2023 onwardHelped carry Nova Scotia's marketing from recovery into the ocean-led and music-led campaigns that followed.
One regret fits neatly inside that philosophy. She wishes she had found a formal mentor earlier. Unofficial guides helped, but an experienced person outside the direct reporting line might have offered a different map of the field. It is a specific observation from someone who later taught, chaired a cultural organization and accumulated the perspective she once wanted access to.
- Separate awareness from consideration. They answer different questions.
- Use familiar cues as an entrance, then reveal the range behind them.
- Keep the outcome steady while changing audience, timing and message.
- Build the promise from research and lived experience, not decoration.
The next version of familiar
In 2023, Your Ocean Playground made the Atlantic influence explicit. Fitzgerald described the ocean as a differentiator broad enough to include experiences not literally in the water but shaped by it. Three years later, a campaign credited to the Tourism Nova Scotia team paired travel with a playlist of Nova Scotian musicians, carrying the province into Canadian, American and European markets through television, audio, social media and a custom playlist.
The creative wrapper changes because culture changes. The underlying problem holds. Travellers have a world of choice and a partial picture of any one place. A destination marketer has to respect what is known, expose what is missing and make the distance between the two feel worth crossing.
Fitzgerald once described her vision for Atlantic Canada in terms larger than tourism: innovation, immigration, diversity of thought and leaders who make it easier for people and businesses to visit, work and live in the region. Tourism sits inside that ambition as both invitation and proof. It lets a place rehearse the story it wants newcomers to believe.
Nova Scotia's postcard will keep doing its job. The lighthouse will stand on the granite. The horizon will remain photogenic. Fitzgerald's work begins a moment later, when recognition gives way to a better question: what else is there?