Where Community Branding and Destination Branding Meet

The art and science of product branding is a complicated field. When you take this field and apply it to branding a place it can get very complicated. People tend to have strong emotions tied to places they've visited and even stronger emotions tied to the places they've lived. 

A key part of any strategic branding initiative is the emotional appeal. It has been my experience that people tend to reserve a different set of emotional characteristics to places they live to places they only intend to visit. Of course there is a good amount of overlap in these but people feel differently about the place they call home. Even a small town is a complicated concept to grasp as a product. Every store you visit and every person you meet impacts the brand. 

I look at destination branding and community branding as different things. Destination branding has the advantage of limiting the brand messages to a greater degree than community branding because people are not constantly interacting with the (ever changing) product. When you are living in a community you the negative inputs are very difficult for the brand manger to control. Someone cuts you off in traffic in the morning and you cannot get that negativity out of your mind all day, the community brand is impacted. Remembering that negative messages have much greater power than positive messages, the community often loses the battle to improve its image in the mind of locals. This is the well known concept "the grass is always greener" where places look better from a distance.

Two of the times (or circumstances) that the differences in destination vs. community become smaller are during holidays and key community events. When "family and friends come to town" we have a tendency to look differently at our community. As hosts we feel the need to think like a tourist. This is where these two types of branding meet. And this is where communities/destinations have some of their best opportunities. By focusing strategic energy on creating or improving local events you can impact both locals and visitors. Every destination marketer would hope that their locals would be their best promoters but this is not often the case. Many locals tend to have the perspective that "this is a great place to live but you wouldn't want to take a vacation here" while tourists often feel their favorite vacation destinations are "a great place to visit but you would want to live there." A great local event that brings out a large cross-segment of the community can do more for branding that place than almost any brand-image advertising campaign.


Another challenge for community branding is the power of apathy and indifference. Our minds are designed to take the repetitious data that we intake daily and sort it into a category labeled "unimportant." Unfortunately for a community those might be many of the best assets the the community has to offer. If you have smooth streets and beautiful parks your mind will eventually only remember the new bump in the road. It's why so many cities get more calls about the (relatively few) potholes in their streets than they'll ever get about the great parks. How many people do you know that are passionate about a local museum? Think about this: Are you more likely to visit a museum while you are out of town on a vacation or while you are in your home town? You have no urgency when you are "at home."