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Branding London: selling an Olympic city of contradictions
Sam Jones. Those tasked with marketing the capital for the 2012 Games have been working on what they hope is a winning strategy. For the past four years, while thousands of Olympic and Paralympic athletes have been pounding tracks, lifting weights and ploughing along pools in preparation for the London Games, those tasked with marketing the city have been plugging away at what they hope is a winning strategy of their own.
Like the competitors, their utterances are peppered with talk of dream results, golden opportunities, and a once-in-a-lifetime event. But unlike the athletes, they will not know just how well they fared at the London Olympics until long after the last races have been run.
Dan Ritterband, director of marketing and 2012 communications for the London mayor, Boris Johnson, is blunt in his analysis of the opportunity the Games provides to showcase London to tourists, businesses, investors and students: "It doesn't get bigger than this," he says.
The only problem - or challenge, as PR people tend to prefer - is how to market a vast and rarely homogenous city to hundreds of different and demanding overseas clients.
With Cool Britannia a distant memory and the financial sector struggling to shake off its ugly reputation, do you sell the capital on its traditional merits - a comforting convergence of Harrods, history, and fish and chips - or on its forward-looking credentials, as a city of tech entrepreneurship, cutting-edge fashion and sushi?
"I'm an adman by training and so the London brand has always been a concern," says Ritterband. "Within a couple of months of us winning the [mayoral] election in 2008, the whole market collapsed and in the research we did, the world blamed Wall Street and the City. Our reputation as the home of financial services was seriously tarnished."
With the Games just four years off, Johnson convened a panel of 30 experts from different businesses to advise him on branding. As well as recommending that the capital's promotional bodies - Think London, Study London and Visit London - become a single entity, London and Partners, the panel stressed the importance of creating a brand for the city.
The challenge, however, lay in defining and translating London's peculiar metropolitan DNA. "London is about the juxtaposition; it's the old with the new; it's a conceit. The whole city is a city of contradictions," says Ritterband.
"London is all about its people and its businesses; it's not about the mayoralty or the states of public office. It's about the West End theatres along with the East End cool trendies. It is about the financial institutions as it is about the startup tech sectors in the east."
Asked to sum up London in a single phrase, Ritterband opts for one of his boss's lines: "A cacophony of noise." But when it comes to the mayor's economic post-Olympic aspirations, Ritterband is more forthcoming. Although a Visa report has suggested the Games will see an incremental Â750m spent in London during the competition - and Ritterband insists he can see the day when Parisians come to Stratford for shopping trips - much of the marketing focus is on bringing big business events such as congresses and conventions into London.
"Business travellers spend three times as much as leisure travellers," he says. "We love our 55-year-old north Americans coming round and saying, 'Hey, honey, isn't this sweet?', [but] we'd much rather the 55-year-old American gynaecologist coming with 10,000 colleagues, who spend considerably more and get around the city more."
London and Partners has developed its own strategy for pushing the city. The 6,000 non-Olympic-accredited foreign journalists who will be based in the central London media centre will find themselves immersed in a seven-week bootcamp.
"It's a 50-day content programme, with over 500 events across a multiplicity of different categories from business to culture, education, fashion, through drink, film, history, heritage; you name it," says Martine Ainsworth-Wells, director of marketing and communications at London and Partners.
"It will expose media to a part of London or a sector of London that they're not familiar with, which is hopefully, exciting, insightful, interesting and engaging."
If all goes according to plan, those journalists will file dispatches singing the praises of a multi-faceted capital, encouraging many who watched London 2012 to make the trip for themselves. London and Partners hopes its efforts will result in an extra 1.1 million visitors over the next five years, contributing around Â50m to the capital.
Despite the emphasis on Silicon Roundabout, avant garde fashion and the Â6bn spent regenerating east London, the government-funded tourism agency stresses that London's past still has a vital role to play in the city's future development. "Let's remember that people do want to come here to see the heritage and the pageantry because that perhaps is something that they can't get anywhere else," says Sandie Dawe, chief executive of VisitBritain.
"You can shop in Dubai and you can shop in Singapore; you can shop anywhere. Yes, the shopping on offer in London is amazing but you can't see the changing of the guard anywhere else. We're not embarrassed about that."
As far as Dawe is concerned, the perfect image of the city is one that unites London old and London new: the tower of Big Ben framed by the huge white circle of the London Eye.
Such juxtapositions are the order of the day for the duration of the Games. Londoners and visitors can expect to see circuses appearing in unusual parts of town, along with ballet in lidos, poetry readings in gothic cemeteries and orchestras on the capital's waterways.
These are the kind of events that Ritterband feels best sum up London. Trying to explain the capital's nature and appeal in a single image or slogan, he says, is difficult and, probably, wrong.
He remembers some journalists describing the rebranding of London as an attempt to find London's Big Apple. "That was never the intention," he says. "That's when people need to come up with a marque that represents everything about their city; ours is personality driven. It's the quirky bit at the heart of it. We are absolutely made up of our people: people go to New York to become a New Yorker; people come here to be themselves. Anything can blossom in London and everything is encouraged in London."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jul/16/london-2012-olympics-marketing-capital?newsfeed=true
Image source: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zLBXCmFAZvQ/T7yy2A_EQ7I/AAAAAAAAA-s/4kCuxRPhKSc/s1600/11150_0000026ca_872e_olympic-logo.png
Like the competitors, their utterances are peppered with talk of dream results, golden opportunities, and a once-in-a-lifetime event. But unlike the athletes, they will not know just how well they fared at the London Olympics until long after the last races have been run.
Dan Ritterband, director of marketing and 2012 communications for the London mayor, Boris Johnson, is blunt in his analysis of the opportunity the Games provides to showcase London to tourists, businesses, investors and students: "It doesn't get bigger than this," he says.
The only problem - or challenge, as PR people tend to prefer - is how to market a vast and rarely homogenous city to hundreds of different and demanding overseas clients.
With Cool Britannia a distant memory and the financial sector struggling to shake off its ugly reputation, do you sell the capital on its traditional merits - a comforting convergence of Harrods, history, and fish and chips - or on its forward-looking credentials, as a city of tech entrepreneurship, cutting-edge fashion and sushi?
"I'm an adman by training and so the London brand has always been a concern," says Ritterband. "Within a couple of months of us winning the [mayoral] election in 2008, the whole market collapsed and in the research we did, the world blamed Wall Street and the City. Our reputation as the home of financial services was seriously tarnished."
With the Games just four years off, Johnson convened a panel of 30 experts from different businesses to advise him on branding. As well as recommending that the capital's promotional bodies - Think London, Study London and Visit London - become a single entity, London and Partners, the panel stressed the importance of creating a brand for the city.
The challenge, however, lay in defining and translating London's peculiar metropolitan DNA. "London is about the juxtaposition; it's the old with the new; it's a conceit. The whole city is a city of contradictions," says Ritterband.
"London is all about its people and its businesses; it's not about the mayoralty or the states of public office. It's about the West End theatres along with the East End cool trendies. It is about the financial institutions as it is about the startup tech sectors in the east."
Asked to sum up London in a single phrase, Ritterband opts for one of his boss's lines: "A cacophony of noise." But when it comes to the mayor's economic post-Olympic aspirations, Ritterband is more forthcoming. Although a Visa report has suggested the Games will see an incremental Â750m spent in London during the competition - and Ritterband insists he can see the day when Parisians come to Stratford for shopping trips - much of the marketing focus is on bringing big business events such as congresses and conventions into London.
"Business travellers spend three times as much as leisure travellers," he says. "We love our 55-year-old north Americans coming round and saying, 'Hey, honey, isn't this sweet?', [but] we'd much rather the 55-year-old American gynaecologist coming with 10,000 colleagues, who spend considerably more and get around the city more."
London and Partners has developed its own strategy for pushing the city. The 6,000 non-Olympic-accredited foreign journalists who will be based in the central London media centre will find themselves immersed in a seven-week bootcamp.
"It's a 50-day content programme, with over 500 events across a multiplicity of different categories from business to culture, education, fashion, through drink, film, history, heritage; you name it," says Martine Ainsworth-Wells, director of marketing and communications at London and Partners.
"It will expose media to a part of London or a sector of London that they're not familiar with, which is hopefully, exciting, insightful, interesting and engaging."
If all goes according to plan, those journalists will file dispatches singing the praises of a multi-faceted capital, encouraging many who watched London 2012 to make the trip for themselves. London and Partners hopes its efforts will result in an extra 1.1 million visitors over the next five years, contributing around Â50m to the capital.
Despite the emphasis on Silicon Roundabout, avant garde fashion and the Â6bn spent regenerating east London, the government-funded tourism agency stresses that London's past still has a vital role to play in the city's future development. "Let's remember that people do want to come here to see the heritage and the pageantry because that perhaps is something that they can't get anywhere else," says Sandie Dawe, chief executive of VisitBritain.
"You can shop in Dubai and you can shop in Singapore; you can shop anywhere. Yes, the shopping on offer in London is amazing but you can't see the changing of the guard anywhere else. We're not embarrassed about that."
As far as Dawe is concerned, the perfect image of the city is one that unites London old and London new: the tower of Big Ben framed by the huge white circle of the London Eye.
Such juxtapositions are the order of the day for the duration of the Games. Londoners and visitors can expect to see circuses appearing in unusual parts of town, along with ballet in lidos, poetry readings in gothic cemeteries and orchestras on the capital's waterways.
These are the kind of events that Ritterband feels best sum up London. Trying to explain the capital's nature and appeal in a single image or slogan, he says, is difficult and, probably, wrong.
He remembers some journalists describing the rebranding of London as an attempt to find London's Big Apple. "That was never the intention," he says. "That's when people need to come up with a marque that represents everything about their city; ours is personality driven. It's the quirky bit at the heart of it. We are absolutely made up of our people: people go to New York to become a New Yorker; people come here to be themselves. Anything can blossom in London and everything is encouraged in London."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jul/16/london-2012-olympics-marketing-capital?newsfeed=true
Image source: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zLBXCmFAZvQ/T7yy2A_EQ7I/AAAAAAAAA-s/4kCuxRPhKSc/s1600/11150_0000026ca_872e_olympic-logo.png