5 June 2009

By Chris Fields, Senior Brand Strategist, Twist Marketing

Thanks to the Coca-Colas and Pizza Huts of the world, we all know what a product brand is, but for a municipality or region, just the idea of creating a product brand that captures the complexity of community can put therapists on the municipal payroll. The irony is that creating the municipal equivalent of "Pizza Hut and nothing but" or "Have a Coke and a smile" is more critical to community prosperity than ever. Have you ever considered how branding can be applied to municipalities and regions? And how it can help communities prosper in a challenging economy?

Unless they're marketing a mass-consumption item like toilet paper, product brands do something communities have thus far been hesitant to do. Product brands are designed for niche markets – carefully targeting their message to an audience they have determined will be more motivated to purchase their product. In other words, corporate brands work to be something to someone. Communities, which by their very nature comprise people of all stripes, generate marketing that tries to be everything to everyone. What is surely the best of intentions – to sell a community representing the diversity of residents and the diversity of investment, tourism or quality of life options – achieves an opposite reaction in the marketing space: watered-down messaging. It becomes marketing noise in a creative and crowded marketplace vying for people's attention ... and a waste of precious marketing dollars.

What to do? What to do?

Well, the first thing to do is to let go of the all-or-nothing paradigm. Marketing is NOT about selling everything a community has to offer. It's about focussing on elements you want to attract to your community, whether it's a new form of economic activity, entrepreneurial spirits you need to drive business growth, community pride and passion building that creates in internal salesforce for your community, or a combination of desired goals.

To illustrate, in the tourism game niche marketing is not about pretty mountains, trees, and water. Many communities have what you're trying to sell. The better marketing question to ask is this – what is truly unique about my community? In many cases, it's less about the physical geography and more about the spirit of people, and a grouping of amenities that create a singular experience for a specific type of visitor – from wine taster to backwoods adventurer. Community brand is about leveraging your strengths to create a quality of experience that is appealing to the types of people and enterprise you want to add more of to your community. No offense to the breadth of your community, but marketing is about achieving a community's highest hopes and aspirations and the wisest use of dollars to achieve that, which means targeting the specific marketings that will bring the biggest bang for your buck.

The second thing to do is to stop thinking of community brand as a pretty logo or a flavour-of-the-month advertisement. Community brand can truly create an "ah ha" moment in municipal life if it's used as a way to focus on community vision and development direction. Brand-building can bring many complexities of community life together in an unprecedented way – from economic development to community pride building to tourism attraction. Community brand-building can serve as a lightning rod for generating unity of collective vision that many in the rough-and-tumble world of democratic community think is a challenge too big to overcome.

Think of community brand-building as an onion. In the inner layers is a confidence that stems from your brand's answer to two fundamental questions: "Who are we?"; and "Who do we want to be?". On the outer layers of your onion are the things we see, hear, see, touch, and smell that make your voice louder than your competitors….to your target audience.

When community brand has explored a community's personality, its values, and its development direction, it is then empowered to do what marketing needs to do these days: find the more risk taking creative expression needed to deliver a shot of caffeine to an audience wallowing in information fatigue.

A logo. Stationery. Banners. Entrance signage. Advertising campaigns.

This is low-hanging, brand-building fruit that is a good place to start. But brands built from the heart of community with an eye to an ambitious future, and that reflect the always-unique personality of place, can surprise with unforeseen abundance.
A community poster campaign. A thematic Facebook page. Unique promotional products the business community can get behind. A parade float. A funny book of community observations about life.

When community brand takes on a life of its own and heads in directions that surprise, the positive impact on a community's future can be profound.

The Twist: It's time to stop thinking of community brand as just a pretty logo or an advertisement. Unleash the full potential of community brand by using it as a lightning rod to power a collective community vision. Think like you're product-branding and focus your efforts. Create a quality of experience that appeals to target markets. Find unique brand expressions. Create consistency and endurance for your marketing effort. It's entirely possible to believe the day your community made a decision to pursue community branding will be remembered as a watershed moment in your community's history.

For more marketing articles, please visit www.twistmarketing.com/resources