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Client: Spanish Fork City, Utah
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Spanish Fork's New Branding Iron
Matt Reichman - Daily Herald
SPANISH FORK -- The investment Spanish Fork City made on revamping its image over the past two years wasn't just about acquiring a snappy new logo, city officials say.
The forthcoming shirts, street signs, business cards and even utility bill envelopes bearing the new "Spanish Fork: Surround Yourself" logo/strapline are the means, not the end, assistant city manager Seth Perrins said.
"Our brand is not a logo or strapline; our brand is whatever emotion, thought or feeling is evoked when you see that brand," he said.
Perrins recently pitched to city officials the details of a branding campaign, the culmination of more than a year's worth of surveys and studies and hundreds of pages of research and recommendations. The city teamed up with Tennessee-based community-branding company Northstar Destination Strategies to figure out how to grow Spanish Fork without losing Spanish Fork.
"It's wonderful," Mayor Wayne Andersen said. "It gives us an identity that we need that we can incorporate with residents, the Chamber of Commerce and local businesses."
The strategy revolves around the theme, "Surround yourself," which plays on the city's mountain-walled location as well as the city's tight-knit feel. Perrins said that while the city certainly wants to attract visitors and businesses, they don't want to lose the city's character. As an example, he noted that the number of faces a born-and-raised Spanish Fork resident might recognize in the grocery store today equals the number he or she couldn't recognize at the grocery store 20 years ago.
The campaign is supposed to maintain that sense of community through uniformly colored and themed signage, potentially including billboards, tourism guide advertisements, and city Web sites and publications. Northstar even dictates what colors/permutations of the new logo the city should use to maintain a consistent image.
The hope is that the new brand will help enhance the city's simplistic "rodeo town" stereotype without squashing it entirely.
"It's not that we're not that; it's that we're not just that," Perrins said. In recent months, he's has taken to Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds to warm up for the project, which kicks off around February.
Northstar conducted exhaustive, seemingly bordering-on-overkill studies to figure out how Utah County perceives the Spanish Fork brand, and what to do about it. The results include comical but telling comparisons to Brawny paper towels, Ford trucks and Jimmy Stewart. Surveys in which residents said whether or not they would recommend that a friend move to Spanish Fork yielded higher-than-national-average scores for Spanish Fork, while recommendations that a business-owner or vacationer come to Spanish Fork were subpar.
Northstar's recommendation package, somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 pages, talks about how to boost those numbers via programs such as open-house tours to potential businesses.
"What we have now is a guideline and map to market our community," city manager Dave Oyler said of the 24-month branding. "It's a tool for economic development and to attract residents by giving the true flavor our city."
The city has set aside $20,000 this year for the project, a drop in the bucket compared to the past year's research costs. However, many expenses, such as letterheads, will bear the new logo but are already counted in different areas of the budget. The $20,000 will go to new decorations and programs.
Such programs might include Northstar's event ideas such as a Wrapped in Warmth quilt fest, or Spanish Fork Surround Sound music festival, names which purposefully connote the idea of surrounding oneself in all that Spanish Fork has to offer.
