Building a Brand for your City and your Public Assembly Facility
The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.
Therefore it makes sense to understand that branding is not about getting your target market to choose you over the competition, but it is about getting your prospects to see you as the only one that provides a solution to their problem.
The objectives that a good brand will achieve include:
• Deliver the message clearly
• Confirms your credibility
• Connects your target prospects emotionally
• Motivates the buyer
• Concrete User Loyalty
To succeed in branding you must understand the needs and wants of your customers and prospects. “A brand is the most valuable real-estate in the world, a corner of the consumer’s mind.”
Branding a city or your Public Assembly Facility are similar in a some way but different in others. Branding a city for example would let people know what they can do in your city or how it makes them feel when they are there. Branding a building is generally more basic and is service oriented. It is about keeping your promises. Do you actually have a modern and clean facility with unparalleled service, or do you just say you do? You must have a good track record about keeping your promises or you will wander in mediocrity.
"The art of marketing is the art of brand building. If you are not a brand, you are a commodity. Then price is everything and the low-cost producer is the only winner.” Philip Kotler, professor of marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
John Lawlor of the University of Texas said, Commodities are things like oranges, bananas, coffee, athletic shoes, and microprocessors. Brands, on the other hand, are Apple, Sunkist, Chiquita, Starbucks, Nike, and Intel. Given this definition, ask yourself: Is my institution a commodity or a brand?
Brand identity is the essence of how you would like your employees, clients, potential clients, suppliers, attendees and the public to perceive your facility. People base their perceptions of your facility or city on the emotional benefits they associate with it as well as its attributes, personality, and symbols.
Two brand-related concepts influence consumers, according to the market research firm Yankelovich Partners: brand image and brand loyalty.
Brand image is how Yankelovich describes consumers' desire to use brands as signals of personal identity and success. Its surveys find that people tend to purchase the same brands their friends use, and that consumers feel that buying certain brands indicates they've "made it."
Brand loyalty describes consumers' preference for familiar brands. In surveys, people report sticking with brands they like and feeling that it's risky to buy unfamiliar brands.
So you can see that people's reactions to brands are very personal. In their book Strategic Marketing for Educational Institutions, Philip Kotler and Karen Fox note that the following conditions indicate high personal involvement with a brand:
1. The consumer's decision will reflect upon his or her self-image and could have long-term consequences.
2. The cost to carry out the decision involves major personal or economic sacrifices.
3. The consumer feels that making a wrong decision holds personal and social risk.
4. There's considerable reference-group pressure to make a particular choice or to act in a particular way, and the consumer is strongly motivated to meet the expectations of these reference groups.
Building brand equity
If you own a business, you establish its value by increasing its net worth. In other words, you strive to build equity. The same is true for cities and buildings. Developing equity for your institution's name is the first step in establishing your brand identity. Brand-management expert David Aaker calls this brand equity—the set of assets and liabilities linked to your brand's name that add to or subtract from its value. To evaluate your institution's brand equity, determine if it has these four assets:
1. Brand name awareness refers to the strength of a brand's presence in the consumer's mind. You can measure it according to the different ways in which consumers remember your brand, such as through recognition (Have you been exposed to the Cobb Galleria Centre before?), recall (What convention centers in Georgia can you name?), top-of-mind recall (the first brand a person names), and dominant recall (the only brand in a market that he or she can name).
To pump up your institution's brand awareness, you must first develop a cohesive, consistent marketing effort with all those the city or the building that influence your brand: the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the local news outlets, for starters. Once you've got your plan, make sure everyone who might interact with the public on the group’s behalf knows about it—from the mayor down to the grounds crew.
2. Perceived quality is the customer's perception of the overall quality of a product or service with respect to its intended purpose. Substance must always back your claims of quality. And remember that the public may determine quality differently than you or your institution would. In the 1980s, people perceived high price as an indicator of quality. That's not necessarily the case today.
3. Brand loyalty. What makes your facility or city a more pleasant experience than others? What are the lasting memories of visitors?
4. Brand associations are anything linked in memory to a brand—its specific features, a celebrity spokesperson, or a particular symbol. The value of those associations determines part of your institution's brand equity.
When branding a city don’t try to be something you are not. If you can’t convince the local people what your brand is you won’t fool the visitors either. If you are Disney and you mention the Magic Kingdom people know what to expect. On the other hand if you are a small rust belt city in Ohio it won’t take folks long to find out that the area is not filled with “Magical Nights”.
When branding a public assembly facility you must create and deliver a positive experience. At the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta we used works of art to relay what we wanted people to think of us as, thus we used “A Masterpiece in Motion” theme. Our caterer was renamed to Masterpiece Creations and we used the symbolism of “Creating a Masterpiece Experience” and our delivery of service and high quality in our promotional video. The feedback from one client was that we were “The Ritz Carlton of Convention Centers.”
With the proper guidance by a professional, a brand of a public assembly facility or city can be shaped into a feeling that actually stands for some emotion or quality. This is then backed by experiences, and then is shared in the minds of consumers.
1/5/07