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

Top 10 Branding Blunders

Branding a community is much more complex than branding toothpaste. Not only is the process highly political, it is very emotional. People are deeply connected to the place where they choose to spend their time, their money and their lives. North Star’s experience branding communities nationwide has taught us a lot about the right way to brand a place. But we’ve also learned a thing or two about what NOT TO DO!

These missteps can put the kibosh on your community’s brand success.

1. Make your brand just about a logo and strap line -A logo and strap line alone are not a brand. They are a brand identity. And while that is a good start, true branding goes much deeper. It is unrealistic to expect a logo and a line to do all the heavy lifting from a marketing perspective in a community; other branding activities must be put in place.


2. Proceed without research - Branding without research is like building a house without a blue print. It can be done, but the end result won’t be square! A solid body of qualitative and quantitative research is the only way to determine what your brand essence actually is.


3. Ignore your culture and heritage focusing solely on your aspiration- The best brands do give a community room and resolve to develop. But if you build your brand entirely upon dreams for the future, it’s the equivalent of false advertising.


4. Engage the press for the first time during the unveiling- Local media are essentially vocal stakeholders in your community (with a built-in audience for their opinions). Work to obtain buy-in throughout the process by involving them in various aspects of the research.


5. Brand by committee - Branding is not about compromise or even consensus. It is about determining the strong singular message that will define your community. The quickest route to watered-down pabulum is trying to please all the people all the time.


6. Apply strict controls for usage by private sector and other public agencies-Brand usage cannot be a free for all, but if you are too controlling few organizations will want to embrace it. Leave room for customization so people can feel like they really "own" it.


7. Reveal your brand to the public without stakeholder buy-in -Before launching your brand, launch an educational campaign to build grassroots support for the effort among stakeholders. This turns community heavy hitters into advocates rather than adversaries.


8. Have your community vote among several logo choices OR Make a contest of creating your community’s strap line -This is branding by committee taken to the extreme. And the fastest way to disenfranchise your citizens is by asking for their input and then ignoring it.


9. Brand yourself -Self-branding is a little bit like self-analysis. As part of the community, you are too close to the situation to clearly identify and solve the problems.


10. Announce the brand without some high-profile implementation - Unveiling the brand before you have brought it to life in some high-profile ways (signage, bus wraps, website, etc.) is asking for a lukewarm response ... and often criticism of city government’s inability to follow-through.

Enough of the don’ts! To learn about the do’s of community branding check out North Star at www.northstarideas.com. Make sure and click your way to some of our community success stories.

~ Christi

Community Brand Logo Families

The holidays are all about spending time with family. This year when you're gathered around the table or the tree, take a peek at your peeps and ask yourself these questions:

• Is there a parent that the rest of the family can relate to?
• Do members work together? Or are they divisive?
• Do they represent the family well? Or are there some you're embarrassed to be seen in public with?
• Are they memorable?
• Are they recognizable as family, even to strangers?
• Do their own personalities shine through even as they represent the greater family unit?
• Are they flexible enough to mix and mingle with all different types?

Okay, most human families can't hold up to all that
scrutiny . . . BUT a family of logos, well that's a totally different story!

The most successful community brands work because they are integrated throughout the fabric of the community. And many of North Star's clients have developed comprehensive families of logos . . . all in the spirit of the overarching brand . . . for use by organizations, foundations, businesses and even individuals.

Now these are some families that have their act together!

Mesquite, Texas (click for case study) and McKinney, Texas (click for case study)
Sometimes changes are subtle. Check out how the strapline evolves to support different organizations.

Columbus, Georgia (click for case study)
Sometimes versions involve developing customized illustrations to support different assets and entities.

Columbus, Indiana (click for case study)
Sometimes color, typeface or one unique graphic element are the glue that visually bring together a wide variety of logos in a community.

MyersCroxton Group expanded North Star's mark for other Columbus organizations

Santa Rosa, California (click for case study)
Sometimes a distinct element of a more complex logo can be used alone to offer a consistent . . . but wholly unique look. Derivations of the strapline also make the graphic identity more flexible.

Overland Park, Kansas (click for case study)
Sometimes a simple color change can provide a powerful contrast for different organizations.

Go HERE for additional examples of community brand logo families

Finally, here are some logo series that don't involve communities or North Star clients . . . but we think they are pretty darn clever nevertheless (including College Hill Neighborhood Association, Woolworth Limited, Weathervane Farm, and Softway). http://www.logolounge.com/designers/

How hard is your community logo working to differentiate you? Do you have a family of logos? If so, take another look at that family and again, ask yourself:

• Is there a parent that the rest of the family must relate to?
• Do they work together? Or are they divisive?
• Do they represent the family well? Or are there some you're embarrassed to be seen in public with?
• Are they memorable?
• Are they recognizable as family, even to strangers?
• Do their own personalities shine through even as they represent the greater family unit?
• Are they flexible enough to mix and mingle with all different types?