St. Louis: City of … ” “St. Louis: Where … ” “St. Louis: Come See Our … ” What the heck are we supposed to be, anyway? In this age of marketing, identity is defined by a brand. Seattle is the Emerald City. New York is the Big Apple. Denver is the Mile High City. What does it say about us that we can’t come up with a pithy little motto that sums up what is great about St. Louis? The best we’ve been able to do is the Gateway City, which says more about geography and St. Louis’ status as a stop on the way to somewhere else that it does about the city itself.
We know who we are, some might argue. Why do we need a brand at all? The answer lies in outsiders’ perceptions of the city. Ask 100 people across the country what they think of when they think about St. Louis, and you’ll get 100 different answers. That lack of focused identity is why St. Louis needs a brand, and fast.
In April, the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission submitted a plan to the mayor and county executive calling for, among other things, “a genuine destination brand” for the St. Louis region.
The commission is pulling in major players and intends to have a plan inside the year. Everyone agrees that it’s necessary— but it won’t come cheap.
Allen Adamson, managing director of brand-consulting firm Landor Associates, estimates that it takes three to six months and between $50,000 and $1 million to develop a brand.
According to Steve Johnson, Regional Chamber and Growth Association senior vice president for economic development, the RCGA will spend at least $800,000 this year for the development of its own branding campaign. It’s a big investment, but one that can yield huge dividends.
Such was the case in Hartford, Conn., which five years ago was allocated $750 million by the state for brick-and-mortar improvements that leveraged an added $2.5 billion in private investments. “This city really had to turn around,” says Michael Kintner, project director of the Hartford Image Project.
But, as with St. Louis, tangible improve- ments weren’t enough to liberate Hartford from the negative image it had long (and justifiably) held as a poor, dangerous city surrounded by affluent suburbs. “We had a real problem here,” Kintner says. “Going into the city, you were taking your life into your hands.”
None of this is lost on the three groups working together to brand St. Louis: the CVC, the RCGA and the Downtown St. Louis Partnership. A new brand would lend unity to their fractured marketing campaigns and force to their separate messages.
Currently the CVC, which aims to attract individual visitors and groups to St. Louis and St. Louis County, is using a two-pronged marketing campaign. There’s a “Hello, My Name Is St. Louis” sticker to lure meeting planners and an “Explore St. Louis. The Complete Getaway” tagline for an advertising campaign designed to sell the city to tourists within 300 miles.
The RCGA, whose mandate is to lure new businesses or expand existing businesses to the 16-county St. Louis region, announced in May that it had secured local advertising and public-relations firm Fleishman-Hillard to develop its own branding-and-marketing plan.
The Downtown St. Louis Partnership, which sells downtown to locals and potential residents and business owners, is also working on a marketing campaign.
The goals of the three organizations might seem disparate, but a good brand can encompass them all. “The challenge is to create an umbrella brand under which they can then promote leisure travel, meetings and conventions and economic growth,” says Scott Hanson, president and CEO of Toronto-based advertising-research firm Longwoods International. “A successful brand has the ability to work for multiple masters; it provides a halo.”
The growth of travel that combines business and pleasure dovetails nicely with the idea that a single brand can work in several arenas. For meetings and conventions, for example, destinations need to do more than communicate that they have the requisite hotels and convention space, they also need to focus on the “pre-, post- and spousal experience,” says Hanson.
At the macro level, everyone has the same goal, says CVC president Carole Moody: “We’re all trying to bring people to St. Louis.”
And a brand will make the endeavor much easier.
Moody says the three organizations are meeting monthly and will begin talks to develop a common brand this fall, once each has a fully realized marketing plan. Meanwhile, they are bringing in the creators of a program called BrandScience to walk them through the process. Thus armed, they can begin hammering out a common identity to be used in all marketing efforts.
The trick is to come up with the right brand. Hanson points to two branding campaigns his company has worked on as examples of doing it right. In the early 1990s, Hawaii was experiencing increased competition from cheaper beaches in Mexico and Florida.
Deciding that it was the cultural experience that made Hawaii different, the state launched a campaign centered on the tagline “The Islands of Aloha.” More recently, New Orleans created a successful brand, “Come Join the Parade,” based on the perception that it is the most European city in America. Both saw significant economic returns.
The first step toward a similarly successful campaign, and the most difficult, is a dispassionate examination of what is truly special about St. Louis. Is it our family-friendly feeling? Our low cost of living? Our location? Our reinvigorated downtown? “A brand helps people understand what a destination is all about,” says Carl Winston, director of the hospitality and tourism management program at San Diego State University.
But the brand can’t just grow from the love St. Louisans hold for their hometown—it must also take outsider perspectives into account. The biggest obstacle to successful branding, says Hanson, is “subjective opinion and passion. It’s important to step back and take a look at the landscape from the visitor’s perspective, with open eyes and ears. Talk not just to the converted but to those who aren’t visiting.”
St. Louis would be wise to heed that advice, because a misstep in the branding arena can be catastrophic. Brands that miss the mark do more than languish in obscurity—they can actually hurt a destination. Las Vegas, for example, in 1998 decided to remake itself into a family destination. Big mistake. “You can put a logo up there, but it doesn’t make people change what they come to destination for,” Winston says. “I tried taking my kids to Vegas, and it was OK for about a day.” Hordes of parents had the same experience, prompting Las Vegas to return to its Sin City roots with a much-lauded 2003 campaign called “What Happens Here, Stays Here.”
“If you’re trying to use a logo to change perception,” says Adamson, “you’re wasting your time.” Hanson agrees: “The brand needs to reflect natural attributes. If you miss the mark in terms of the most important thing to communicate, you will see failure.”
And it might be a type of failure that’s difficult to get rid of. People love a label, and when a brand is bad, unclear or outdated, they have a tendency to invent their own. Thus poor Cleveland earned the moniker “The Mistake by the Lake,” and San Diego (once lamely dubbed “America’s Finest City”) became, in light of political corruption and financial mismanagement, “Enron by the Sea.”
Marketing the wrong thing is just one potential pitfall. Another is lack of focus. “A lot of people make the mistake of trying to include every little thing about the destination, and they say so much they end up saying nothing,” says Karen Post, branding consultant and author of Brain Tattoos: Creating Unique Brands That Stick in Your Customers’ Minds. Adamson agrees: “The more focused and single-minded the idea, the more powerful the brand. People can’t remember 10 reasons. They can’t remember three reasons. The best you can hope for is that they remember one.” (So forget about “St. Louis: We Have Great Restaurants and History and Green Spaces.”)
Another key issue is perception versus reality. A brand should elicit a “hmm,” not a “yeah, right.” In fact, branding experts say, one of the biggest mistakes destinations make in developing a brand is not delivering on a promise.
“Brands are a disaster if, when you hear them, they are so far removed from reality,” Adamson says, “like if you said, ‘St. Louis: The
Most Exciting City in America.’ People would hit the ‘give me a break’ button. Then it becomes a total waste.”
So we need to be in touch with reality, and we need to focus on something quintessentially St. Louis. How about ... the Arch? “You also can’t do something that people know already, like ‘St. Louis: Home of the Arch,’” says Adamson. OK, then.
Nor can the brand be something anyone can claim, so “St. Louis: Jewel of the Midwest” is out, as is anything about being friendly or having lots of attractions. And if you’re thinking that maybe we could just borrow a successful brand identity from another destination, forget it. “You can’t just do what another city does. A me-too is the fastest way to make a brand ineffective,” Adamson says.
Another minefield is the process itself: the way in which a destination arrives at its decision. Although Moody insists that the CVC, RCGA and Downtown St. Louis Partnership will work together to develop a common brand to be used in all their separate marketing campaigns, clarifying what the destination is promising the visitor, the process of reaching consensus might actually compromise the effort. “It’s very hard to move forward with a brand when the decisions are made by committee,” says Post. “In a perfect world, a strong leader who’s not afraid to do things that are not the norm is what it takes for a brand to be successful.”
Allen agrees: “The more opinions, the worse the branding. You can’t have a committee create a brand idea, because the best brands have a clear point of view. Consensus doesn’t necessarily lead to stronger ideas.”
When those committees become important is after the brand has been developed. The success of the Hartford brand, Kintner says, lies in the fact that the Hartford Image Project is made up of 12 different organizations, from the mayor’s office to private companies, and all use the brand’s logo in their stationery, business cards, advertising and so on. “The more impressions you get, the easier it is to build brand awareness,” he explains.
Another worry? The fact that the CVC, RCGA and Downtown St. Louis Partnership are working on their own brands before joining forces on an overall brand concept. Branding experts say it doesn’t make sense to retrofit a brand to existing marketing campaigns.
“They are doing it exactly backward,” says Adamson. “The proper way to do it is top-down: Define what the core St. Louis brand stands for and then find a complementary way to talk about different entities underneath that. Trying to build up means that you start off with three pieces that can only be put together by the loosest association, so the master brand will end up being ineffective or confusing.”
Here’s hoping that the three entities will be able to overcome any problems in process, because the right brand could mean big things for St. Louis. Business and pleasure travel to St. Louis represents an economic impact of $3.8 billion annually, and a successful brand could give that number a significant boost. There are intangible benefits as well. “A brand also has an impact on the local population, in terms of their own feelings about the place where they live,” says Hanson. “It’s a very powerful thing—as long as you get it right.”
