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 shout about it, saying, ‘We are loser tryhards’ is not the message we want to give off.
Mr Fitzgerald, have you asked how potential visitors would perceive this sign? Did you not learn much from last year’s experience, where there were international people joining anti-sign groups? Or that there were comments from branding experts abroad who felt this sign was a massive joke?
Marketing is not always about shouting, nor is destination branding. It’s about, first and foremost, getting your internal audience on side. In the case of the ‘Wellywood’ sign, you’re failing at that. One poll last year showed four in five Wellingtonians were against this sign.
Secondly, marketing is a job that’s done not just by Tourism Wellington, but by all residents, because it’s no longer a mass media, topâdown discipline. People power drives a destination’s brand.
You’ve just made this city that much harder to sell, which has consequences for visitor numbers and airport usersâbut should I really expect a non-Wellingtonian, non-New Zealander to understand what this place means to us?
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.
As I said last year: copying someone does not celebrate our originality.
The sign runs counter to any notion of Wellington’s creativity and civic pride.
Let’s go through the motions again. Time to dig out last year’s emails to the Hollywood Sign Trust, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the licensing company with a new link to the Fairfax Press article.
Yeah, I’m a narc when it comes to protecting originality, more so when it’s going to make our city look like a global laughing-stock. I would similarly act for any Kiwi firm that gets ripped off by someone else. Even in non-election years.
A very good Vista Group luncheon (Jim, Natalie, self), where we discussed: the Gap rebrand; The Hobbit, unions and the BNZ Centre boilermakersâ 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 (was there a change of strategy, management, or trend?) though we did see a reason for Wellington to do so.
âAbsolutely, positively Wellingtonâ has been with us for 20 years. I remember when it was first released, all set in Perpetua Bold, adorning the new office of the Wellington Chamber of Commerce after its shift from Church Street. As Jim pointed out, it was a contrast to the negativity that Wellingtonians had about our cityâs own image, as typified by TV shows such as Gliding on: drab, grey, and full of civil servants.
The one event that might have given us a bit of a boost was Sesqui. And what a disaster that turned out to be: an event that never began.
I said as much when we discussed the arts and cultural side to Wellington during the campaign. The brand, Mayor Prendergast mentioned, was revamped when she took office. Nine years on, I think we need to move on again: that Wellingtonâs brand does not reflect our cityâs passions.
Every brand must be inclusive. It must also differentiate. There are many people in the ICT sector, who are an important part of Wellington, who need to be included. We have fashion designers and event producers, who thrive on the notion that Wellington is the most creative city to be in. When the former mayor said that we were now also the culinary capital, I said that we had to define that by way of our cityâs creative manna: not just the culinary capital, but the culinary artsâ capital. Everything we do seems to be underpinned by this idea of putting in that extra zing, whether itâs my oft-quoted example of Silverstripe or the quality behind Mojo Coffee.
There is work to be done, and Iâd love to engage with Wellingtonians on getting some kind of framework down for a 2010s city brand. The campaign may be over, but itâs only highlighted the things that need to be done. Letâs start with the strategic ideas and work our way to the operational.
Mostly by focusing on growing creative clusters and taking a bigger slice of the cake. So it is not from technocratic ideas or the notion that we are liberating more of the economy, but by growing entrepreneurship. The city will take the most socially responsible, entrepreneurial start-ups and act as an agent to grow them (with an agreement that they remain in Wellington, of course) and create the capital flows to get them funded. I realize there is Grow Wellington already, but their ambit will be shifted.
So, itâs economic growth from the bottomâup.
Then (italics added for this post):
The clusters have naturally formed but they can get so much stronger. If the city is being them, then there is no reason Wellington cannot become internationally known for them. I think in this last week I have shown that borders mean very little to me, and anyone who wants to be mayor in the 2010s needs to have a similar mindset. We are not competing just for national resources, but global ones; and by being part of the global community, we might start bridging more communities and getting some greater global understanding. The nationâstate as it was understood in the 20th century is dying as a concept, and governments have only themselves to blame. Things are shifting to the individualâcommunity level, and you are right, real things happen when it is people acting at the coal face. Those who distance themselves will not be equipped for this century.
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.