How’s this for a new city slogan: “Calgary, city with nice zoo and big airport near Banff”? It’s not as sexy or as clever as our new city slogan, but at least it’s honest.
The reason we need an image at all is that if we let the truth speak for itself, it wouldn’t be very enticing. This isn’t about slagging Calgary. It is a fine city with a positive, clean appeal and it’s populated by fine and friendly folk. But as a premium tourist destination, truth is, Calgary is unlikely to be high on many bucket lists. But never mind, that’s why we have marketing.
There are many things to do here, no doubt; we have a great zoo with a beautiful new science centre nearby. Heritage Park can be fun for an afternoon. And the Glenbow Museum — despite its ugly, unfriendly facade — attracts visitors. But together they don’t amount to much when compared to the world’s premier city destinations. We have lots of pleasant things to do if you’re already here, but people don’t choose Calgary because of them.
But so what? It’s not a crime to be what you are. And a tourist mecca we’re not, which is why Tourism Calgary’s latest flailing attempt to create a new city brand feels so phoney.
Now, from the same folks who brought you the brazenly banal “Calgary, Heart of the New West,” comes the equally trite “Calgary, Be Part of the Energy.”
The slogan, supposedly, captures the exuberant vibe of a young, hip city coolly ambling into the future (with an oh-so-clever double-entendre alluding to the slippery source of our fortune). “Be part of the energy” is one element of the new brand for Calgary, a marketing initiative by Tourism Calgary and related industries to bring more people to the city. But like the slogan it’s replacing, and for the same reasons, it will fail.
Why? Because both are fakes and people know it — the products of the imagination of some marketing genius in a cubicle somewhere rather than a true reflection of what a visitor can expect. What happens when people get here and find out that by six at night, all the energy has been evacuated from downtown like air from a whoopee cushion?
For the complete FFWD article by EVDS Assistant Professor Noel Keough and Urban Studies teacher Geoff Ghitter, click here.