Inter-American Development Bank
facebook
twitter
youtube
linkedin
instagram
Abierto al públicoBeyond BordersCaribbean Development TrendsCiudades SosteniblesEnergía para el FuturoEnfoque EducaciónFactor TrabajoGente SaludableGestión fiscalGobernarteIdeas MatterIdeas que CuentanIdeaçãoImpactoIndustrias CreativasLa Maleta AbiertaMoviliblogMás Allá de las FronterasNegocios SosteniblesPrimeros PasosPuntos sobre la iSeguridad CiudadanaSostenibilidadVolvamos a la fuente¿Y si hablamos de igualdad?Home
Citizen Security and Justice Creative Industries Development Effectiveness Early Childhood Development Education Energy Envirnment. Climate Change and Safeguards Fiscal policy and management Gender and Diversity Health Labor and pensions Open Knowledge Public management Science, Technology and Innovation  Trade and Regional Integration Urban Development and Housing Water and Sanitation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Ciudades Sostenibles

  • HOME
  • CATEGORIES
    • Housing
    • Sustainable development
    • Urban heritage
    • Smart cities
    • Metropolitan governance
    • Urban economics
    • Urban society
    • Cities LAB
    • Cities Network

Why Branding is Important to Our Communities

September 26, 2016 por Autor invitado 1 Comment


“Branding” is a staple in the corporate world to strengthen a company’s image, launch a new product, or build customer loyalty to a service. Increasingly, the public sector is looking at branding tools beyond the traditional tourism marketing to build equity among citizens, investors, and visitors in cities, towns, and communities. Sometimes these brands are done as a singular initiative but many communities are including a branding component in downtown master plans, neighborhood plans, and economic development strategies.

Incorporating branding strategies in a plan provides a set of tools that communities can easily deploy to better communicate community goals that will advance the efforts early in the process. In some cases, engaging in the branding plan before a plan can be a strategy to align a community around a common vision. Most importantly public agencies often battle the perception that communities are “reacting” to development proposals rather than being proactive about the future. A clear message about what a community is about can alleviate that concern.

Branding is a confounding term particularly with regard to communities. Citizens and public officials often find the term off-putting as an artificial way to attach a clever logo or tagline to a place (or worse still to “theme” a community. To take a well-known example, the Mercedes Benz logo of the three-pointed star is a critical component of the company’s identity, but the actual brand is much more than this logo: it implies precision, luxury, performance, and style. The three-pointed star has gone from simply a logo for Mercedes to an internationally recognized icon.

For communities, logos and taglines are merely tools to implement a brand. A true brand is the differentiation between a product, service, or locale using a set of tools that include logos, taglines, typefaces, and colors. The tools, well deployed, will craft that differentiation and make it clear to the “consumer” — or, in the case of communities, the host of stakeholders involved (residents, business owners, investors, visitors). At the end of the day, a good community brand is a promise a place makes to people. It is built over time and capitalizes on the imagery, feeling, and allegiance felt when people see the image of their community whether it is a symbol that evokes history (or progress), a tagline that builds pride of place, or colors and typefaces that evoke images or signals sense of place for the community.

This blog post will introduce the concept of community branding outside the context of traditional tourism marketing. It will explore why branding is important for communities and explain the common misperceptions and missteps communities make when developing or implementing a brand.

Why Brand Your Community?

Community and economic development officials play a critical role in giving a voice and illustrating the aspirations and dreams of a place. These professionals and their peers spend countless hours educating policymakers, building partnerships, and cultivating the public trust so they can revitalize, grow, and craft places where people want to live, work, and invest.

As community and economic development officials, our work can be a metaphor for throwing an eternal party: we book the band, order the food, make sure the decorations are in place, and arrange the room. Yet, all too often, we do all of this and forget to send out the invitation for people to enjoy what we have done.  That invitation is a community brand and more importantly a sound community marketing strategy.

We have a great opportunity to succinctly tell the story of our communities through properly building identity for the places where we work. One way to do this is to incorporate “brand-building” into the economic development process. Whether it is a neighborhood revitalization strategy, a downtown planning effort, a community economic development strategy, or even a comprehensive plan, we are engaging the public in a process that asks them to delve deep into their sense of place and hopes for the future of the place they live and work. Incorporating quality graphic tools into the effort allows the efforts to take on a dimension it would not have otherwise. Using brand elements like a proper and consistent typeface, logo, tagline or slogan, and a consistent color palette can focus the plan around an identity and tie the plan to the place.

There are practical considerations as well. A well-executed brand creates a toolbox for stakeholders to use that is consistent, saves time, and doesn’t require a reinvention of the wheel every time staff develops a new publication, web page, cover sheet, or PowerPoint presentation. In fact, well executed brands can be deployed in countless ways beyond the logo and tagline. A brand system can unite events, organizations, and other amenities as desired by a community; can be deployed in environmental graphics including banners, wayfinding signs, and gateways; and can be used for digital graphics such as web page redesigns, social media tools, and smartphones.  Ultimately, a sound marketing strategy creates efficiencies of consistency between message and mission.

Successful brands can also serve as a way for communities to partner with businesses to better market a locale. Examples here might include ad templates for merchant association and individual business use. Some communities have used their identity systems to create public art, shirts and hats, and even jewelry.

The Pitfalls of Community Branding

Community branding can be a complex task especially when confronting the question “To whom are we marketing?” Tourism has been the most common reason communities have traditionally branded themselves. Branding has long been the realm of country, State, or local visitors’ bureaus. However, a brand crafted exclusively for visitors runs the risk of not resonating with locals.

Outside of tourism marketing, community branding has often been relegated to a committee charged with creating a seal or logo or an open contest judged by a committee. The results of these exercises range from excellent to disastrous. This process takes considerable time and deliberation that can drain any creativity out of the original design. In our work with communities, we have seen community seals packed full of images that include a flowing river, cogs in the wheels of industry, religious symbols, and even the scales of justice superimposed upon a wingless eagle.

The other trap that ensnares communities is cliché. As a firm that has worked in many downtowns, we often are amused by the two camps that many downtown logos fall into: the clock/lamppost camp and the precious building facade camp. The clichéd tagline invariably involves one of the phrases “heart of,” “gateway to,” or the much-dreaded “cherishing the past while embracing the future” which has numerous permutations.

A true brand avoids clichés, is relevant to locals, and is done with creativity in mind. The best brands are authentic, meaningful, and forward thinking. That’s not to say that a community should not acknowledge its history, but rather it should use that history to tell the story of what the community is about today. Consequently, the term “branding” is debated among those of us who engage in the practice. Many citizens are naturally skeptical of branding as a term as it sounds artificial and thus off-putting. We have started using the phrase “community image building” or “community identity” as a more apt way of describing what a community brand is. In Latin America, the term “marca de ciudad” or “marca de comunidad” are much more precise terms for a branding effort.

Tripp Muldrow, AICP, is president of Arnett Muldrow & Associates, Ltd., founded in 2002 in Greenville, South Carolina. A past president of the South Carolina Chapter of the American Planning Association, Tripp has conducted downtown master plans, neighborhood revitalization plans, and economic development strategies alongside extensive branding work in three hundred communities in forty three US States as well as in Canada and Belize. 


Filed Under: ENGLISH

Autor invitado

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. MiniBig says

    February 18, 2019 at 9:15 am

    Nice blog I have gone through this day. The topic is extremely good and covered all things, and probable no doubt in future also, this website is very nice . Now days some best companies are the marketing and offering the best projects like Branding Design Service for the people who want to start his own new business.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Follow Us

Subscribe

Description

Este es el blog de la División de Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano (HUD) del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. Súmate a la conversación sobre cómo mejorar la sostenibilidad y calidad de vida en ciudades de América Latina y el Caribe.

Search

Recent Posts

  • Bilbao Ria 2000: urban regeneration through local self-financing strategies
  • Keys for a successful public-private partnership: the case of Washington DC
  • Financing Green Cities in Latin America and The Caribbean
  • How does the IDB Group support the development of women in cities?
  • Housing as Home: The Less Explored Side of Urban Development

¡Síguenos en nuestras redes!

Footer

Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo
facebook
twitter
youtube
youtube
youtube

Blog posts written by Bank employees:

Copyright © Inter-American Development Bank ("IDB"). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. (CC-IGO 3.0 BY-NC-ND) license and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose. No derivative work is allowed. Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC- IGO license. Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.


For blogs written by external parties:

For questions concerning copyright for authors that are not IADB employees please complete the contact form for this blog.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDB, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.

Attribution: in addition to giving attribution to the respective author and copyright owner, as appropriate, we would appreciate if you could include a link that remits back the IDB Blogs website.



Privacy Policy

Derechos de autor © 2023 · Magazine Pro en Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo

Aviso Legal

Las opiniones expresadas en estos blogs son las de los autores y no necesariamente reflejan las opiniones del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, sus directivas, la Asamblea de Gobernadores o sus países miembros.

facebook
twitter
youtube
This site uses cookies to optimize functionality and give you the best possible experience. If you continue to navigate this website beyond this page, cookies will be placed on your browser.
To learn more about cookies, click here
X
Manage consent

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled

Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.

Non-necessary

Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.

SAVE & ACCEPT