The Globe and Mail

The potential for a marketing payoff

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time: Bring thousands of the world's leaders and high-level bureaucrats to Toronto for a couple of days, wine and dine them between high-level discussions about geopolitics, and send them home with fond memories of a satisfying convention and a winning tourist destination.

But if the predictions of some marketers are correct, Toronto's G20 summit next weekend will not be just a lost opportunity to market the city, but might significantly hurt its brand.

As thousands flood in from the other G20 nations, Toronto's well-documented siege mentality, which has led to the planned closures of museums, theatres, sporting events and other tourist destinations, can only be bad for its image. “When you see the barricades up, the city has no charm any more,” says Ken Wong, a Queens University professor of marketing and vice-president of Toronto-based Level5 brand consultancy. “When you combine that with the likelihood of protesters, the city will lack any kind of [impression of being] a nice place to visit. If it becomes at all violent, it'll lose that positioning as well. All of these are essential to Toronto's current positioning in the marketplace, as a diverse place that everyone can come to.”

Inviting the world to Toronto and then shutting it down, he says, “is like inviting friends to your home and then having your wife throw them all out. Or husband.”

The problem posed by the event

Marketing a city during a summit is a tough proposition anyway, especially at a time when news organizations have been cutting back and aren't interested in sending reporters and camera crews to foreign locales for long periods of time just to report on the setting of a meeting. When Pittsburgh hosted the G20 last September, executives with its convention and visitor's bureau recognized that if they wanted to tell the world about the city's transformation from steel town to a hub of new economy creativity, they would have to do so before the leaders set down.

Joe McGrath, CEO of Visit Pittsburgh: “We never planned on doing anything during the two and a half days of the summit, because we knew all the media would be captured in the building and not be doing anything except following the G20.”

Robert Li, University of South Carolina: “Place marketing, country marketing is quite different from corporate brand advertising, marketing. You have very limited weapons in your hand. Your product is much more ambiguous and fuzzy. You have very little control over your product. You don't really control your restaurant, you don't control your attractions – they are run by their owners. So for place marketers, the most dependable assets in their hand is their brand, and their job is to keep polishing their brand, keep building positive brand associations with it, and special events can help that.”

There is such a thing as bad publicity