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Brand Loyalty in Calgary Will Not Be Achieved With Slick New Slogans
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Given the animosity that I expressed towards Calgary’s cowboy iconography in my last piece, I should be applauding city hall’s move to rebrand the city by changing its slogan from “Heart of the New West” into something more “cosmopolitan.” Instead, I thought I would take the opportunity to argue that rebranding Calgary is a terrible waste of the municipality’s meager resources, and that this money would be better spent rebranding Calgary from the ground up by investing in local festivals.
To use the words of social geographers Mihalis Kavaratzis and G. J. Ashworth, “places do not suddenly acquire a new identity thanks to a slogan and a memorable logo.” Places are made by the people who live there and the events they attend, not by the forgettable welcome signs seen alongside the road.
The City of Calgary has already spent $100,000 and will spend a total of $295,000 on the rebranding project. This money would be better spent on actually improving day-to-day life within the city.
It has been a short six years since the City of Calgary’s last “rebranding,” in which we ended up with brilliant kitschy cowboy hat logo and a new slogan self proclaiming the city as the “Heart of the New West.” Putting aside the inadequacy of this slogan, rebranding Calgary now would be the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. The money spent on rebranding would be better spent on refurbishing the local culture into something worth bragging about. Why not rebrand once we have something to sell other than the Calgary Stampede?
Right now there are many cultural activities that need to be overhauled and amped up before we can brag about how cosmopolitan we are. There is The Fringe, The Lilac Festival, and The Sun & Salsa Festival, all of which could get a big boost from a $300,000 infusion from city hall.
We need to make these already successful festivals more like the Stampede in terms of breadth and depth. Extend Fourth Street’s Lilac Festival and Kensington’s Sun & Salsa festival from an 8-hour public parade into a weekend festival. It makes no sense to set up the infrastructure of events this size only to tear them down the same day they go up. People are at these events already, so give them a reason to stay past 6 pm. They will bring economic activity, civic engagement and liveliness to the neighbourhood. Bigger cultural events will bring joy to people’s lives and at the same time increase their brand loyalty to the city.
Cultural events could certainly help increase Calgary’s declining citizen satisfaction rating, which, reported in the most recent budget, is currently sitting at a 10 year low. It currently sits at 67% and it is dropping steadily from the once proud 98% satisfaction rating of 2004. If the city wants to encourage brand loyalty they should focus on citizen satisfaction, which will undoubtedly increase with improvements to the quality of life. I can’t see how new slogans and logos could do the same.
If I were Mayor Bronconnier, I would take that $300,000 and give it to a worthy local cause, like the growing Sled Island Music Festival, the crawling Fringe Festival, or the boisterous Lilac and Sun & Salsa Festivals. Build a brand from the ground up, not from the top down. It’s cheaper and better for the people who live, work, and visit Calgary.
Kavaratzis and Ashworth have argued that branding is “in the viewpoint of the end user; in terms of the way they sense, understand, use and connect to the place.” Connection to a city is not achieved through logos and slogans, it is built through the positive experiences of its citizens. Civic pride and civic satisfaction must be earned by the city, not dictated by it.
