Washington County, Oregon was calling itself the “silicon forest” as far back as the 80s.

The main thing behind any good brand is a ring of truth. Sometimes, a city needs help making it’s good qualities and assets more known, but one can’t just assume thats what’s going on. Often, the city has bad qualities that are too far known too ignore like Detroit’s lack of convenience and density.

If the reality is remotely good slight spin resonates and people take it viral. Bald faced lies and denial is what most cities do.

Don’t assume that admiting problems is bad. Look at the buzz Youngstown has gotten for moving openly to acknowledge and fix problems almost everybody knew about.

This is the sort of feel good, follow-the-fad nonsense that led to half the states in the union prefixing “Silicon” to some geographic trait in the late 90s.

Cities need economic development executives who actually have a pair, and can define simple, distinctive themes. Omaha, for example, doesn’t need a “creative director” to market itself as a leading location for agribusiness. Same with Detroit and cars, Cincinnati with consumer brands.

Branding, done well, is a long term undertaking. Being “slow on the uptake” is too narrow a view for such a project and can actually be beneficial for this type of work. Anything on a shorter time frame is simply an ad campaign or plain old advertising. Ad campaigns typically run 1-3 years, sometimes as long as 5 years or longer. At the point of those longer measures though, the ad campaign changes into a branding effort. In my mind, branding campaigns are always a minimum of 5 years, but often reach into decades.

These numbers are mine and they are pretty soft with a lot of overlap, so here’s an analogy: Advertising talks about the great artist in a tattoo shop off of Main Street; a campaign talks about the tattoo shop, the bakery, a restaurant and the vintage clothing shop; branding talks about the “splendid chaos” culture that developed Main Street which allowed the artist to open up a tattoo shop and to flourish.

Understanding what the marketplace does care about matters, and it matters a lot. The place that marketplace opportunities, stakeholder aspirations and available resources align will define a “product” with certain characteristics and attributes — a promise, if you will. Branding is just the act of managing that promise.

Having a branding strategy doesn’t preclude all of the wonderful and amazing things that happen in urban environments. It should help communicate clearly to prospective and existing investors that you have a focus, a plan and that you are quite serious about it. To me, that’s the ultimate benefit of branding — enhancing investor confidence.

If the private sector can be organized to underwrite branding efforts, that’s great. Like many revitalization initiatives, however, I think it will be most effective as a public / private endeavor.

Just my two cents…

Branding practices work well in corporate command structures. Those have greater flexibility with rules and resources, easier discipline mechanisms and relatively fewer stakeholders.

You don’t have that with civic institutions. A meme has much less gravity than policy.

The problem with civic institutions is that they are slow on the uptake. A lot of what makes cities great is due to “splendid chaos,” an event or events unplanned or unforseen that ends up a positive transformation. It could be as grand as Silicon Valley in the 1990s or something as subtle as tattoos becoming something you no longer have to trek to skid row to get.

Civic institutions rarely anticipate these shifts, and most of the time acknowledge them when it’s too late. By then, you’ve created too many interests locked into place and resistant to change or abandonment.

If human civilization was able to create great cities without the help of branding experts, we’ll get along fine through the next epoch.

The manifestations of branding should always be appropriate to what is being branded. What Budweiser does apparently works for them, but would be entirely inappropriate for any civic organization. I’ve found that any city that tried such transparent tactics has fallen flat on its face, garnering reactions such as yours.

Answer: No. It’s frippery.

When cities have to start thinking of themselves as brands, the city becomes a Budweiser commercial.

Think about why Budwesier advertises in the first place. It’s only purpose is to justify its market share.

Budwesier is “post office beer.” Not many people admit to liking the post office, yet everyone knows about it and count on it to be a constant presence no matter what. That’s Budweiser’s role.

Yet it still blitzes advertising. It has commercials of Clydesdale horses, parties, frogs, you name it … the only thing it doesn’t sell is itself.

Budwesier knows it can’t sell its beer on its merits, and that’s the point of the advertising. It amuses its audience while taking their attention away from the beer.

Cities will resort to advertising-as-sleight-of-hand because it will take attention away from problems that need to be solved through policies, economic incentives and collaboration of interests.

The city as brand would squelch out any restiveness or pressure to reform or try something new.