A lesson (good and bad) in city-regional branding

When you think about Atlanta, are you really thinking about the airport? When I think about Atlanta, I think "south," Coca-Cola, black mayors and leadership, civil rights, Varsity burgers, Jimmy Carter, Ted Turner and CNN, and the Atlanta Braves, WTBS, Olympics, sprawl, Atlanta Underground, flowers and plants, Morehouse College...

The excellent and thought-provoking Retail Design Diva, the companion blog to DDI magazine, calls our attention to:

Brand Atlanta, an organization put together in 2005 to promote the city as a tourism destination, has even established a newly branded logo and tagline for the city--"every day is an opening day"--and is as we speak now marketing product sporting the new ATL emblems.

I can't say that I personally think either the logo or the slogan is that great. (The campaign is also discussed in this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Three Macy's stores to sell Brand Atlanta wares"--registration required.)

I have discussed marketing by government or government-like organizations before, in "Making Transit Sexy." I wrote last November:

A long time ago, I read the book Strategic Marketing for Not-For-Profit Organizations by the U of Michigan Social Work professor Armand Lauffer. One of the concepts that has stuck with me over the years is that organizations have three publics:

1. The input public that provides the organization with resources;
2. The throughput public that does the work of the organization; and
3. The output public to whom the organization's activities are directed.

I have a hard time believing that the logo and slogan being promoted by Brand Atlanta is directed to the output public... I wrote about this further (in "More on Metro and rethinking transit marketing":

Transit marketing must be reconceptualized along the lines of this framework.*

One problem with WMATA, and these problems start at the top, is a tin ear in terms of listening and relating to the public. They need to rethink their public communications efforts, and develop different kinds of campaigns according to the type of public they are attempting to reach.

Anyone who took expository writing in school remembers those lessons about "defining your audience." The one problem with those classes is we didn't learn about how to categorize audiences more generally. For nonprofit and government organizations, Lauffer's work is particularly useful in this regard.

(* This was written before Dan Tangherlini took over as the director of WMATA.)

The Atlanta brand identity program is commissioned by a nonprofit, in effect, and it is important to know who you're marketing to and what you are trying to achieve. I'm sure that the Brand Atlanta people have figured this out, but I wonder...

It's funny because I had a great conversation about similar issues with someone with the Anacostia Trails Heritage Area at the Preservation Maryland conference last week. She got her start in corporate travel marketing, in an aspect of direct marketing, so she is much more about results rather than broad identity development campaigns. I too have more of a direct marketing background, having worked for a nonprofit advocacy group that has one of the most successful subscription-based newsletters in North America...

With the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by other destinations on marketing, economic development promotion, and tourism development, diffuse brand development campaigns are not affordable.

Also see the blog entry "Town-City branding or "We are all destination managers now"," from February 2005.

Brand Atlanta does have some interesting stuff on their website. I just think it misses the mark.



Index Keywords: tourism