With ‘Wellywood’, Wellington Airport misses the point about how to brand a city

I think this shows just how badly Wellington Airport CEO Steve Fitzgerald misses the point: Being niche and understated is cool positioning for a local audience, but to be relevant on the world tourism trail, we need to shout about why we are great.    Actually, not always. And even if we did have to […]

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Time to fight the Wellywood sign—again

Wellywood sign: see blog posts from last year (like this).    You’d think Wellington Airport would know that the majority of residents are against this awful idea. An intelligent person would think: floating an idea in 2011 that was nearly universally rejected in Wellington in 2010 isn’t smart.    Yet that’s exactly what they’ve done. […]

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Wellington needs a new brand for a new decade

A very good Vista Group luncheon (Jim, Natalie, self), where we discussed: the Gap rebrand; The Hobbit, unions and the BNZ Centre boilermakers’ strike; and my mayoral campaign.    On the first topic, we concluded that it was down to a simple cock-up. None of us could see any reason for the Gap to rebrand […]

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The rise of the city brand

I don’t have the other writers’ permission to show their side of this Facebook dialogue, but we had been chatting about growing the creative clusters here in Wellington as one of my mayoral policies.    I wrote: Mostly by focusing on growing creative clusters and taking a bigger slice of the cake. So it is […]

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The Downfall of ‘Wellywood’

Necessity is the mother of all invention. I never thought some of the Der Untergang (Downfall) parodies could be topped, but I think this just happened. You may also like Chatting to TV, radio and internet journalists for the mayoral campaign Live from Level 3 Steve Guttenberg shows us how a Kiwi accent is done […]

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The ‘Wellywood’ sign: people power gets things done

That was a very interesting 30 hours. I found out about the ‘Wellywood’ sign yesterday afternoon, through Twitter, and Tweeted to say I hated it. Little did I know then that there was a huge Facebook group—6,000 strong at the time of writing—where Wellingtonians were making their voices known.    And when I got there […]

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