Trend Watchers Say “Tap into Local Love by Building Strong Community Brands”

They say that home is where the heart is. And according to experts, that love extends beyond the hearth to the entire community. So how is your city leveraging its citizen’s local love to help build a stronger community? 

Recently the Orton Family Foundation sent an e-blast talking about 2012’s top five trends for building community. Be a Trendsetter in Your Town in 2012: Resolve to Build Community. 

 (FYI: The Orton Family Foundation helps small cities and towns harness the ability of citizens to imagine and achieve a better future for themselves and their community. This foundation is truly a great source of ideas, inspiration and help. Check it out!) 

All of the trends in this article have great application for community branding. For example, using citizens as experts is the general idea behind much of the community research North Star conducts for its community branding projects. And lighter, quicker, cheaper applies to a significant percentage of the strategic action ideas we give to our tourism, economic development and community branding clients. Clearly, it does take some funding to integrate a brand throughout your community, but there are a number of highly effective strategies that are virtually free. 

But the most relevant trend without a doubt is loving local, which talks about building local economy through strategies like buying local or developing your own local brand! This trend links to a resource page on the ICMA website (International City Manager Association), which links to 5 North Star articles to get you started understanding branding.

• Community Branding: Beyond a Logo and a Line: This presentation from the 2011 ICMA Annual Conference gives great insight to the power of marketing and how it can work for your community.
• How Can Branding Help Your City?: A report by the Illinois Municipal League similar to the one above.
• Talk from the Trenches: Top 12 Community Branding Blunders (and How to Avoid Them): This PM article offers guidelines for creating the strongest brand possible.
• Brandstanding: Four Cities Share Their Success: This report offers four different case studies of municipalities’ experiences with branding.
• Putting Communities at the Center of Branding: This PM article discusses how to make your community’s brand strong in a society that is dominated by advertising.

We’ve also seen this local love trend identified in a number of other places including Trendwatching.com, which named Local Love’s “Still Made Here” as one of its mega-trends for 2011. According to Trendwatching, despite globalization, most people still spend their day-to-day life in the same place, with the same friends, colleagues and neighbors. This has huge implications for communities since the people and environment in our immediate vicinity is where we feel a real sense of authenticity, community and belonging to something exclusive. Community is where we have an understanding, feel a sense of control and are able to see and feel the effects of our actions. 

Trendwatching points to some of our favorite strategies to help bring local love to life including buying local products or having local businesses make products that specifically reflect the essence of the community. 

 Is your community on track for these important trends for 2012? How do your city leaders and citizens show local love? Do you have strategies in place to help citizens build and connect with their community?

Iowa's Creative Corridor Banding Study

These days, seems like no one can agree on how to grow the economy. But there's one thing economic development experts do agree on . . . economic growth and competitive advantage occur at the regional level. Not surprisingly, then, regional economic development is the hottest thing since sliced bread. 

But as grandma used to say, "Nothing good comes easy" and that's certainly true of regional collaboration. Many leaders find themselves asking, "We agree we should work together . . . but what happens now?"  

Case in point: Seven counties and 11 economic development organizations anchored by Cedar Rapids and Iowa City formed a region with the working name of Iowa's Technology Corridor. The newly developed region found itself in need of a rallying point to facilitate collaborative thinking and turned to North Star for development of a regional economic development brand. 

"Leaders had done a terrific job bringing the key organizations together," stressed Don McEachern, CEO of North Star. "But they couldn't get off go. A focus on how best to market the region to the world outside brought the stakeholders inside together." 

North Star Destination Strategies research found that this region along I-380 and I-80 is not just a transportation route, but is more like a transformative conduit offering individuals and businesses the resources and opportunities to change and grow exponentially more successful. Art and science, knowledge and power, learning and teaching, and dreams and reality all co-exist and contribute to the transformative environment. After all, everything grows better in Iowa! 

Renaming the region "Iowa's Creative Corridor" establishes it as the source of creative innovation in Iowa. A double helix serves triple duty as the logo. On one level it is a stylized representation of the region's acronym, ICC. On a deeper level, the double helix represents the duality of art and science, the individual and community. Deeper still, the helix is reminiscent of DNA, which represents the spark of life and the signature of the individual.

  

Creative work uses the beauty of real DNA to present the depth and breadth of accomplishments throughout the corridor. In one example, names of all the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning authors who have graduated from Iowa Writers' Workshop along with their book titles and movies are woven together to create a DNA strand.

 

"North Star provided great expertise in our regional branding efforts. The actual process of branding with North Star was almost as important as the final product. It really served to get us thinking collaboratively. The brand that they helped uncover is a critical part of our overall effort to work and plan more as a region, which will help us better compete in a global economy." - John F. Lohman, President & Publisher/Corridor Business Journal, Corridor Business Alliance
      

Mobile Bay, AL Branding Success Story

 

Who doesn’t love a good game of “Where are they now?” Child stars, athletes, even winners of American Idol and the Biggest Loser. What’s happened since we saw them last? 

We at North Star are suckers for a “where are they now” success story . . . especially a community branding success story! So when we checked out the progress of Mobile Bay, Alabama – one of our favorite past branding projects – we were over the moon with the strides they have made toward total brand integration. 

A quick look back to the branding initiative in 2004 helps put the city’s current accomplishments into perspective. At the time, the community was just known as “Mobile”, which meant that outside city limits most people didn’t even know it was on the water . . . much less that it offers an almost paradoxical blend of cultures, attractions and water activities.

North Star Destination Strategies recommended the city’s name become a catalyst for creating interest by changing it from Mobile to Mobile Bay, which carries all the inherent value a coastal location warrants. Initially developed as a tourism brand, the strategy was embraced by the CVB starting with a name change to Mobile Bay CVB. But as the idea of being Mobile Bay caught on, the chamber and economic development embraced the Bay as well. Landon Howard, Vice President and Director of Marketing for the CVB, initiated the original tourism branding project. Following are a few highlights, according to Howard:

• Trademarked the North Star-recommended line, “Baycation”
• Evolved the brand for tourism to include the concept “Go Coastal”
• Extraordinary development of Bay-based tourism products including
  • Partnership with cruise lines
  • Water taxis
  • Sunset dinner and wine cruises
  • Bayside seafood restaurants promoting water views from your table
  • Complete build-out of hotels (14 new properties in 2009 alone)
  • Arts, dining and culture targeting a “Baycation” for the senses
• Integrated brand language and Bay-based tourism products into all communications including the website, Facebook, Twitter, apps, mobi site, visitors guide, advertising, merchandise, trade shows and conventions and a tourism newsletter called BAYnews

   

 

“The way we talked to our customers totally changed,” explained Howard. “We began focusing on what a Bay experience meant for the five senses . . . the touch and the taste of our diverse culture and the sea breezes. Our official music became a Caribbean mix with a sax, sort of Florida meets New Orleans. We adopted an official menu featuring gumbo, West Indies salad and a fried seafood platter as well as an official drink, the Mobile Bay Sunset. Visitors could sit on the balcony at the Grand Hotel holding their drinks up to the sunset, comparing the colors.”

• Named professional baseball club the Mobile BayBears
• Opened Bay City Convention & Tours, a step-on tour operator
• The Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce developed an integrated logo and line, “On the water, on the move” with a local ad agency, Lewis Communications, and started looking for ways to connect the Bay location to economic development
  • Spent hundreds of millions of dollars updating the port in anticipation of the expansion of the Panama Canal promoting it using Mobile Bay. Became the eighth largest volume port in the country
  • Started actively pursuing hotels, restaurants, entertainment to accommodate the growing cruise travel business

 

“The Mobile Bay brand also helped us regionally,” concluded Howard. “For years the city tried to talk to visitors focusing on history alone. But history alone doesn’t sell. Focusing on the Bay cast us in a totally different light and helped us build some critical regional partnerships we needed to grow as a destination.”

Community Branding: Glendale, CA Case Study

When research indicates that outsiders think of you as a "vanilla" bedroom community, arriving at a memorable brand identity can be a rocky road. Especially when you're located smack dab in the middle of cities as savory as the rest of the 31 flavors combined.

Consider the case of Glendale, California (Click here for full case study), with a solid reputation as a quiet, productive, safe community. Glendale’s location in the midst of Los Angeles, Pasadena and Burbank made it a “spot in-between” in many people’s minds.

“Glendale is located in the heart of the most competitive region in the nation,” explained Don McEachern, CEO of North Star. “In the context of all that glitz and glam; quiet, safe and productive can translate into boring. Glendale is a really dynamic and creative city but it’s not promoted that way. Being safe in Glendale is good,” he emphasized. “Playing it safe is not.”

Learn how leadership kept the brand on track despite a legacy for playing it safe

The key was not to try and make Glendale cooler than its competition, but to identify what is special about the city and then find a provocative hook to leverage that essence for the purposes of economic development. Research revealed that Glendale’s essence is the confluence of dynamic characters and personalities that brings each of the city’s 33 neighborhoods and six business districts to life in a wholly distinct way. The hook is Glendale’s animation industry including being home to the creative campuses of the world-famous DreamWorks Animation and Disney Imagineering.

North Star Destination Strategies connected the dots between the two with a strategy based on the fusion of imagination and vision that makes life more animated. The line, "Your Life. Animated" can be customized by local businesses and industries such as the famous Porto's bakery using "Your Appetite. Animated". The logo, which features five brightly colored graphic spirals can be animated for digital use and manipulated with relevant images in the spirals such as fruits and vegetables for the farmer's market or different brands of high-end cars from the Brand Boulevard of Cars. See an in-depth exploration of the logo and line.

A strategic action plan was developed to integrate the brand throughout Glendale. A sampling of ideas:

• Create an animated presence at the Bob Hope Airport where just walking by can animate the logo with motion.

• Engage city employees in the brand with a simple quiz that identifies their "animation quotient" while promoting assets in the city that can up their score.

• Rework existing entryway signage with brand elements.

The Politics of Community Branding

There’s a popular saying in marketing circles that the four P’s of marketing are price, promotion, product and placement. In other words, those are the elements that must be considered for a successful marketing mix.

So what are the four P’s of community branding? Politics, politics, politics and politics.

When it gets down to it, community brands are typically initiated by public sector entities, which are often accountable to city councils and other elected officials, who are accountable to the citizenry. Throw into the mix differing political priorities, elections, diverse tastes, committees and consensus, changes in administration, budget concerns, personality clashes and about a hundred other factors and you can begin to understand some of the challenges that go hand in hand with community branding.

Check out the top community branding blunders!

In fact, there are a number of key points during the branding process where the project can derail. The key to success is not a “perfect” logo and tagline that everyone loves (diversity of likes and dislikes guarantees that such a thing does not exist!). The key to success is strong, savvy leadership that understands the purpose and possibilities of branding as well as the unique politics of the community.

North Star recently completed a branding project with Glendale, California. Alison Maxwell, the city’s Deputy Director of Economic Development, used education and understanding to guide the community’s fledgling identity through council approval and a media introduction to the public. Following is a sampling of the many things she did right

• Met with North Star to ensure she had a thorough understanding of the brand process, the brand strategy, the purpose and the potential.


• Worked with North Star to reduce more than 200 pages of research findings, insights, creative recommendations and strategic action ideas to a 20-slide presentation that focused on:
  
  
  
  • The city council’s initial goals for the brand initiative
  
  
  • Brief discussion of how branding is not all about a logo and a line
  
  
  • Successful branding campaigns from other products and places (to show evolution and diversity of design taste)
  
  
  • Critical findings and insights from Glendale
  
  
  • How those findings led to a brand strategy
  
  
  • Examples of how that strategy can be brought to life creatively throughout the community (with a focus on economic development)
  
  
• Ensured that the presentation was fast, interesting and informative.


• Did not focus on the logo and strapline or show them in a vacuum. Choosing instead to show those elements only in the larger context of other creative deliverables.


• Previewed the presentation with her staff and the mayor, shortening and refining it further based on their input.


• Met individually with each council member to review the presentation and answer any questions.


• Garnered support from high-profile business leaders from the community, showing them ways that the brand identity could help grow their business and strengthen Glendale’s economic viability.


• Invited business leaders and representative community members to the council meeting where the vote was taking place.


• After the new brand identity was approved, met with the media to answer questions focusing on critical talking points such as why the brand was necessary, research findings and economic development implications. Ensured that enthusiastic brand supporters in the economic development realm were available for interview.


• Developed a plan for integrating the brand in the most critical, effective, high-profile areas within a limited time frame.

What high-profile initiatives have been derailed in your community? What was the cause of the conflict? Was there anything that could have been done to result in a more positive outcome?

~ Christi
christi@northstarideas.com