As I traveled the U.S. giving talks to economic development professionals on how their community brand could uniquely deliver the American Dream, I had the opportunity to listen to stories of many failed community branding efforts. I found the stories unfortunate because for the most part the failures were avoidable. The typical root cause of the failures tended to be one of three things.
In an era of super brands, it may seem an unusual notion to consider a city, state, region or downtown as a brand.
For years, we have lamented the lack of marketing savvy used in developing city and town mottos, taglines and slogans. A very small portion of these are effective in highlighting their municipalities’ unique value propositions.
According the World Travel and Tourism Council, travel and tourism “In 2019, the Travel & Tourism sector contributed 10.4% to global Gross Domestic Product or GDP.” When one considers that businesses, residents and event and meeting planners also choose one place over another, it is no wonder that cities, regions and countries are branding themselves in earnest.
In the face of increasingly intense competition, ambitious places are objectively evaluating their competitiveness and methods of optimizing their relevance and value to internal and external customers. Many of them are adopting the principles of branding to better manage their identities and how they present themselves in a global marketplace.
