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Client: Beaumont, Texas
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Officials move to focus Beaumont's message, market city's strengths
By Dan Wallach, The Enterprise
What is Beaumont's brand?
What name or concept or idea defines the place where more than 100,000 people live, work, play?
The city of Beaumont, the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Greater Beaumont Chamber of Commerce are trying to create such a brand that cuts across such identities of city, bureau, or chamber to make it available for business and individuals in general as a marketing tool that helps to sell the area.
That, they hope, would help to bring in more people, more business, more money, and more opportunity.
Something like that could also help to keep Beaumont's younger people interested in staying here, a goal I've heard area leaders express for the quarter-century I've been reporting news here.
North Star Destination Strategies, a Nashville, Tenn., company that helps cities across the country create such a brand, is helping local leaders with that effort.
North Star helped McKinney, a northern suburb of Dallas, create its brand almost three years ago. McKinney now dubs itself "Unique by Nature," and a uniform logo now adorns a variety of Web sites - such as www.mckinneytexas.org - that various McKinney entities use.
CoCo Good, communications director for McKinney, which is home to about 112,000 residents and boasts a downtown that is about 150 years old - remind you of another city, perhaps? - said the effort to create a brand for her city helped to unify it.
"Everyone had different logos, different messaging points. The city wanted a cohesive marketing plan, and we needed someone to come in - a third party - to lead us to a collective brand," Good said.
The effort paid off, she said.
"It's exploded with popularity - McKinney, Unique by Nature - geography, historical character, the way we do business. Some cities are known for one obvious thing, but we had several factors. We had to hone our message that everyone could agree on," Good said.
One of the fears she said people had was a loss of identity. However, she said the unified brand and logo has enhanced the local identity.
"We invited feedback from the residents throughout the process. We had a lot of input," she said.
That hasn't been exactly the case in Beaumont where the city, convention and visitors bureau and the chamber have kept their cards fairly close.
Last April, North Star invited residents to take part in an online survey - something it called a "competitive differentiator," which would identify qualities that help to make Beaumont stand out in the marketplace.
But the Beaumont team has kept its brand-creation activities quiet, hoping to agree on a direction before taking it public.
McKinney also did an online survey very early in its process, Good said.
She also said McKinney's development of a brand and logo was a "very collaborative process," but she also said that inviting too many people into the mix could be like too many cooks in the kitchen.
"It's a delicate balance," she said. We had to ensure people were comfortable with it before we launched. We didn't go beyond 100 people before we launched."
McKinney rolled its "Unique by Nature" brand in February 2005 and has had enough time to see measurable results, Good said.
"Tourism has increased. We've signed major deals in corporate relocations. We hear time and time again that everything is cohesive," she said.
And now Beaumont's turn is coming up.
City Manager Kyle Hayes and Convention and Visitors Bureau executive director Dean Conwell are hopeful they will have a working model within the next couple of weeks.
They're still not showing their hand.
By the nature of public officials, nothing is unique about that.
