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True Lies
It seems that everybody's jumped on the brandwagon as of late. Sometimes the results are nothing short of inspiring - mainly because brand messages and images transmit essence and truth - and sometimes the results are so offputting as to be laughable or disgusting.
Clearly, not everybody's interested in essence and truth.
Many bloggers - especially political bloggers - spend most of their time ranting about this or that. When I started this blog, I decided I wasn't going to do that but today I'm going to make an exception. This is too good an opportunity to make a point about what not to do when you're creating brand messaging.
If you don't like a rant with an edge to it, I suggest you go somewhere else and read a kinder, gentler post. This ain't it. I can't tell you how hard it is to hit the "publish" button....I just keep thinking about how my mother advised me "If you can't say something nice...."
Sorry, Mom.
I spent the day yesterday in airplanes, winging my way back from the spectacular environs of Rocky Mountain Utah - Park City, to be exact.
When I arrived at Dulles, I spent my obligatory 50 minutes waiting at baggage carousel number 3 for my luggage. The airport authority has a television monitor going there where all manner of politicians ranging from Speaker Dennis Hastert to Senator John McCain welcome tourists to Washington, DC. They're smiling, warm, and friendly. They positively ooze comity and collegiality.
Then the television monitor (that is supposed to distract us from thinking about how the Pleistocene era went faster than our baggage delivery) coughed up Washington, DC's brand new tag line:
Washington, DC. The American Experience.
Right. This is the truth? I don't think so. Washington is anything but The American Experience.
Washington is a grand city - a gorgeous city. As one of my foreign-embassy-cultural-attache friends pointedly observed - Washington is a city that was built to intimidate.
I was never a big fan of Ronald Reagan's politics, but just like a lot of people, I liked the guy. One of the things I admired about Reagan is that he told the truth about Washington. He believed that being within the Beltway distorted an insider's view of how the rest of America thinks and feels. In my view, that's never been truer than it is today. To call Washington the American Experience insults the intelligence of every thinking American. Maybe even every unthinking American.
I'll say one thing for the people who dreamed up this doozy of a loser - at least it's consistent with the image our nation's capital has for telling the truth about most things. I can hear the creative types brainstorming now:
"Listen people! I've got it! The American Experience! It's perfect, I mean....it captures exactly what people expect from Washington: such a blatant, obvious distortion of the truth that, ironically, even though it's complete crap, it's true!"
Get real, people. Lose the tag line.
It's what I like to call a "gag" line - in both senses of the word. It's a joke and it makes me want to toss my cookies.
This tagline is the kind of "clear-skies", "no-child-left-behind", "axis-of-evil", spin-doctor crock-crapola that gives brand-strategy messaging a bad name.
Branding? I don't think so.
PS: Just so you don't think I'm suffering from delusions of grandeur that somehow my opinion of this brand campaign will make any difference, whatsoever...well, have no fear. I know that it will persist. It will try to make itself true through repetition - just like an authentic tag line would. It will try to attract equities - and it will, too. Just like one of those rusty Liberian tankers attracts barnacles.
This little blog rant is just one of them.
Posted on September 3, 2006 01:36 PM | Permalink
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Comments
Neill, I don’t think this was a political rant like the noise that one gets on other blogs. I thought it was a valid branding post about how one city chooses to communicate and symbolize itself—and how it fails to meet up with the reality. In other words, it is like so many branding failures out there: mismatched, deceptive and, inevitably, will lead to disappointment. Like the man who needs a phallic symbol for a car to compensate, Washington needs its tagline.
Having little inside experience with DC, my personal perceptions are based on what I read and what I see on television. My opinion is suspect.
I will venture to say that DC has a brand, firmly planted in the minds of most Americans, and that you're right that this new tagline doesn't match up with it.
One of my favorite David Ogilvy quotes is as follows;
"We spend so much time canvassing public opinion, we forget we can also influence it."
Perhaps the agency in question sincerely wanted to inch a turn out of the rudder of this massive ocean liner that is the public perception of DC as anything but representative of America's good citizens and begin a slow steer into a new direction. Noble, but realistic? You'll probably think me very naive.
There's a really precarious balance between being pursuasive and being misleading, isn't there? On behalf of my fellow citizens who hold out hope that the legacy of that city, at its core, is one of the fundamentally heroic nature of democracy -- that it actually represents, somewhere underneath all of that 'stuff', the principles that allowed an actor (using your own example) to end up there, and then two administrations later a guy from humble beginnings in my own home state -- on behalf of them and myself I will hold out the hope that this tagline was an attempt to break through the cynicism.
Please, God let it be that. I don't want to think about another gross misuse of my tax dollars.