Can “Place Branding” Truly Change a City’s Image?

By: Anna Bielejec

Take New Orleans. “Forever New Orleans” represents the aggressive international branding campaign that New Orleans launched in an effort to dispel lingering concerns about the conditions of the city post Hurricane Katrina. Print and online ads, billboards, television commercials, and a thirty-minute prime time travel show, all funded by U.S. taxpayers, combined to form the multimillion-dollar campaign that was specifically designed to “overcome misperceptions” about New Orleans. According to Lucas Conley, author of the book OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder, snappy taglines such as “Soul is Waterproof” and “New Orleans Is Open. To Just About Anything,” were two such examples of the city’s “desperate” efforts to “rebrand the city” and revive tourism.

Although the tired clichés of what one of Conley’s New Orleans natives described as “buying beads, drinking hurricane cocktails and taking home a poster of a man playing a trumpet under a streetlight” frustrates and disgusts many of the native residents, the clichéd efforts of a post-Katrina New Orleans suffering overwhelming crime rates struggling to rebuild are becoming, what Conley believes, “commonplace occurrence” for towns, cities, states, and countries in the aftermath of disaster. One frustrated native New Orleans resident in Conley’s book argues “the idea that the city’s inherent identity can be packaged up and sold misses the reality of what’s going on,” later summarizing “you can’t brand away a bunch of murders.”

So, the thought of branding and rebranding an actual place raises a fair amount of questions. Does a rebranding campaign’s inability to fix staggering crime rates mean that city officials should absolve all attempts to rebrand their city in an effort to repair the city’s image in the wake of a disaster? That doesn’t seem right, does it? Perhaps the money for an aggressive rebranding campaign should be considered well spent if a city’s image is merely improved? If that were the case, how would such “improvement” be measured? And furthermore, what would the appropriate threshold be for gauging whether a particular amount of improvement was indeed worthy of a multimillion-dollar rebranding campaign? The truth is, clearly, that I don’t know. Regardless, the reach of branding from toothpaste to Tulsa and what Conley describes as “its desirability as a tool to enhance and sell ideas,” continues to amaze me.