Castlegar Current
August 28, 2008
By Kyra Hoggan

Calgary’s Twist Marketing firm threw down the gauntlet to a group of Castlegar stakeholders Monday night as they challenged the city to be creative and take some risks in creating a city brand.

Roughly 15 people representing sectors as diverse as tourism, industry, bureaucracy, government and not-for-profit in Castlegar heard Twist’s Chris Fields explain that good branding is not a consensus process.

“The marketing world is a risk-equals-reward scenario,” he explained. “The single greatest hurdle communities face is that first, initial kneejerk reaction: ‘I don’t like it; it’s different’.”

Fields called on the assembled audience to “champion” whatever brand is ultimately created for the city, rather than “dumbing it down”.

“Be something to someone, not everything to everyone,” he said. “Tying to be everything makes you boring and average.”

He said the end goal was to “deeply and meaningfully reflect the values and aspirations...it’s more meaningful than looking pretty or putting together next year’s marketing campaign.”

Ideally, he said, branding will take longer to bear fruit than a simple marketing campaign—as much as two or three years—but residents will still be harvesting the rewards a decade or more into the future.

A brand can be all encompassing, according to Fields, impacting everything from street signage and the city website to architectural standards and investment strategy.

He said community branding is a tough sell because it’s so intangible, but what it does is create a nucleus around which a community can build its vision for the future, addressing matters as small as website and business-card design through to huge fundamentals such as the city’s corporate investment and economic development strategies.

He also gathered information from those in the room, asking what they felt were Castlegar’s greatest strengths and weaknesses, as well as what people saw as the key identifying features of the community.

This was the second of two visits Twist Marketing staff made to Castlegar before beginning to draw up ideas to bring back in terms of defining Castlegar—to its own residents and to the outside world, including prospective investors, resident and visitors.

Fields said they hope to have some creative genius to present the city by October or thereabouts, bringing up question of civic elections.

He said the branding issue, if addressed before ballots are cast this November, could very well impact the course of the election.

City manager John Malcolm said he was both impressed and reassured after seeing the Twist Marketing process underway.