As if it were solely for my benefit, this month's issue of enRoute, the inflight magazine of Air Canada, published a letter from a reader in Winnipeg (see my earlier post) who is a member of a group called Leadership Winnipeg that has a hand in promoting the city. The author, David Crawford, was responding to a May article in enRoute that was devoted to the growing concept of place branding, which contained interviews with many people including Bruce Mau, known to me mostly as Rem Koolhaas' Canadian graphic designer/collaborator, who was recently hired to re-brand the entire country of Guatemala.
First, a snippet from the article, definitely worth a read:
So, places of the world: Differentiate, brand or die. And since no market is static, be prepared to change, as no single brand will work forever. In that light – as much as we all might be attached to our respective national identities – radical thinking about our national futures is precisely the mindset required. Even Mau acknowledges that the notion of a wholly mutable national character can make one feel a little queasy. “You’re poking right to the bone with the question of how people identify themselves,” he says. “You’re suggesting that what they thought was stable is dynamic, which is, of course, the reality of it.”
A reality that no doubt explains why Interbrand invested in a place-branding department way back in the mid-1990s, and why Papadopoulos thinks the industry will grow “by leaps and bounds,” and why Anholt boldly predicts that place branding will become “a whole new paradigm for statecraft and international relations in the 21st century.”
Second, a response from Crawford in his letter, published in the July issue:
Place branding has an enormous strategic weakness. Progressive civic and political leaders now realize that there is an improved way to "rebrand" a place. What is the fundamental difference between the new and the old approaches? It is rather simple: ask citizens for their values and priorities. The new process is commonly called "regional visioning" and is often defined as "an effort to resolve key economic, social and environmental issues in a manner that represents the values of the region's residents and stakeholders."...Rebranding does not meaningfully engage citizens in the vision-creation process, which must be ties to a long-term integrated economic strategy. Why would anyone create a marketing strategy for an ill-defined product with unknown qualities to be sold at an unknown price?
It's interesting but also fitting that such a discussion exists on the Canadian side of the border, as questioning national identity is, as author Douglas Coupland notes in Souvenir of Canada, one of the definitive trademarks of the Canadian national character, particularly vis a vis Canadians' southern neighbors.
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