Since June, when Mayor Naheed Nenshi and others donned bright red T-shirts to launch a new national marketing campaign, Calgary has been showing its true colours. Called “Be Part of the Energy,” the campaign aims to make Canadians choose this oil-and-gas capital as a place to work and do business.
A partnership between Calgary Economic Development and local companies, Be Part of the Energy arose from the booming city’s chronic labour shortage. Its components include a website, advertising and social media activity.
The campaign’s slogan plays on Calgary’s identity as a young, vibrant city built on the energy sector, says Mary Moran, director of marketing and communications at Calgary Economic Development.
“We purposely made it an invitation and a call to action for people to consider Calgary if they’re considering a change either in business or in life,” Ms. Moran explains. “It was really important that we were able to tell a broad story.”
While developing the campaign with two consulting firms, Ms. Moran and her colleagues had to weigh positive and negative perceptions of their city. On the one hand, she admits, some people think the home of the Calgary Stampede is a redneck town. But on the other hand, Ms. Moran kept hearing that Calgary could do more to promote its lifestyle, cultural and business assets.
Calgary Economic Development, which wants to make their Be Part of the Energy campaign international, also studied other cities’ marketing and branding strategies. It needed a catchphrase with mass appeal, but buy-in from local residents was crucial, too. “The key is to ensure that it resonates with the people of your city,” says Ms. Moran, citing the long-running “I Love New York” campaign.
Cities need strong branding to compete with their global rivals for increasingly mobile talent, capital and businesses, says Greg Clark, a London, England-based adviser on city and corporate strategy and investment. But if city branding is more important than ever, it’s also more complex.
Thirty years ago, it was enough to develop an investor brand or a visitor brand, Mr. Clark explains. But today, people looking for a city with a good university might also be thinking about opening a business there – or about how their parents would enjoy the place as tourists.
Cities must create a brand platform that can operate across those markets, says Mr. Clark. “The idea that you can separate a distinctive brand position for investors versus visitors versus others doesn’t really work so much any more.”
Most big global cities now have branding efforts, Mr. Clark says. Even if they started with a strong inherited brand – think London or Paris – fierce competition has made them far more brand-focused.
The cities that rank highest have a distinctive identity and a clear lifestyle proposition, he says. They’ve also got a potent iconography, whether it’s buildings, an attitude or a way of life.
City marketers should avoid over-promising, warns June Cotte, associate professor of marketing at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business. “You don’t want to market the city you want to be,” Professor Cotte says. “You want to market what you can actually deliver to people.”
As Mr. Clark points out, even some top city brands suffer from weaknesses or imbalances. For example, Paris heavily favours tourism, though the city is also a major business centre.
This is the challenge in brand strategy – “not just to get the identity right or to get the iconography right, but to also get the reputation and the messaging right,” Mr. Clark says. “Or, more precisely, to try and get the experience of the city right.”
