A Quest For One Consistant Message

When I spoke at the 2006 Mackinac Policy Conference about place branding, people in the Detroit Region were already realizing that the city and its immediate neighbors had to get their acts together if they were going to dispel many of the myths about its decline and agree on a new vision for its future development. In the last twelve months, significant progress has been made. The "Road to Renaissance" report of Detroit Renaissance has created a road map to the future for the city's development. This envisions Detroit as becoming the global center for mobility, a global logistics hub, a place with a growing creative community, a place that plays host to and supports the region's entrepreneurial capacity, one that becomes a strong base for the development of the region's talent and promotes itself globally and communicates locally.

This is a great basis on which to draw the wider community of key stakeholders together to create a city brand strategy of real power and effectiveness. This needs to build on the work of the Detroit Regional Chamber, which has been pushing, with great patience, its local partners to see the wisdom of working together to create the city's brand, and on the work of the city's Convention and Visitor Bureau, which has developed a brand to market the region to business people, organizations, sports fans and tourists. This is a great base for these stakeholders to start to work together to create a more holistic brand for the city, one that will represent the place that Renaissance Detroit envisions and one that will showcase the city's distinctive offer to its existing residents, potential investors and future residents locating from other parts of the United States.

This brand needs to deliver a consistent message to the consumers in the target markets that the city wishes to gain the attention of. It needs to focus on the value of the city to them. It needs to be backed up by investment. And it needs to be pro-actively managed by a partnership of those stakeholders who have an interest in the city's well being. It really does not matter who takes the lead on this or where responsibility for the management of the brand is located. What matters is that it is resourced to do a professional job and that the stakeholders invest in "one-brand" actions to bring the brand alive and exemplify it to the market. This is not about a new logo and a new tag line; it's about taking action to deliver on Detroit's promise to its current and potential customers. 

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