Regional brands, regional experiences
Branding represents a dimension of regional economic development that is difficult to do well. Several reasons come to mind. First, civic leaders often think too narrowly. A brand is not a look or a logo. It's about narratives and stories, expressed in terms of a promised experience (the brand promise).
This brand promise is difficult to capture and requires some deeper levels of thinking. The experience itself is multidimensional and must be authentic. In other words, for brand to work you cannot make it up. To learn more about this line of thinking, check out Jim Gilmore's The Experience Economy.
Describing these experiences is tricky. Abstract thinking doesn't work very well. New research on consumer behavior indicates that more concrete levels of thinking move consumers more effectively than abstract terms. Read more.
Not surprisingly, civic leaders don't often feel very comfortable wading into the challenge of developing and managing a regional brand. So, they turn to marketing and branding consultants. There's one problem here, though. As relatively unsophisticated clients, regional leaders are good candidates for manipulation. (One of the more notorious cases took place when a consultant sold essentially the same message and graphics to two different places.)
Cleveland+ represents one of the more goofy attempts to develop a regional brand. Cleveland is trying to position itself as the capital of Northeast Ohio. Yet, Northeast Ohio is a big region (about 4 million people), and the region's economic strength comes from its multiple metros: Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, Canton. These multiple metros give the region a variety of different pilot sites to develop new initiatives for economic regeneration.
Needless to say, the Cleveland+ Branding effort did not do much to inspire leaders in Akron and Youngstown.
More recently, civic leaders in the region seemed to have understood the mistake of their ways. They have launched a new website simply called The Plus. The problem, of course, is that this brand does not capture any of the experience in the region. Indeed, the messages could apply to any region.
Some months ago, I had suggested that the regional leaders in Northeast Ohio expand the Cleveland+ brand in a different way.
At least this approach creates some sense of the strength of the region coming from the collaboration of sophisticated metropolitan areas within the region. There's not much hope for it, though, as the branding effort (headquartered in Cleveland, of course) has watered down the concept to virtually nothing.
These thoughts came to mind as I read about a region in northern Arizona that launched a new regional brand.
