Fifteen Common Place Branding Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

This article is written by Bill Baker, Chief Strategist at Total Destination Marketing, author, speaker, and blogger at “Small City Branding around the world”

Adopting a city brand offers tremendous rewards if done correctly. However, sometimes these well-meaning efforts introduce levels of complexity and pitfalls which could easily have been avoided if leaders had understood the nuances of brand planning for cities.

Many city branding projects get off to a great start with a lot of publicity and energy, only to soon run out of steam. Their momentum starts to lag, fresh ideas are not as frequent, designs start to miss their mark, and suddenly the brand has faded, it is confused, and becomes very fuzzy to customers and stakeholders. Here are some of the fifteen common pitfalls that can contribute to these situations are:

1. Insufficient Understanding Of Branding
2. Lack of Stakeholder Buy-in
3. Failure to Grasp the Scope of Branding
4. Focusing On Short-Term Results
5. Forgetting The Customer’s View
6. Disagreeing What is Being Branded
7. Insufficient or Irrelevant Research
8. The Weak Positioning Trap
9. Not Following the Strategy
10. The Lure of “Bright Shiny Objects”
11. Forgetting to Deliver What You Promise
12. Unhelpful Mindsets
13. Brand Fatigue
14. Going It Alone as a DIY Project
15. Not Engaging Specialist Skills

This article has been re-posted with permission from http://citybranding.typepad.com/city-branding/page/2/