Beyond the Limits of ‘Toronto Unlimited’
Giannina Warren, MA, PGCert
Middlesex University London
overview
• Toronto: a ‘World Class Wannabe’
• Launching – and losing – a brand strategy
• ICON Model of Place Branding
• New strategies, different results
• Toronto: the ‘Creative City’
Toronto: ‘World Class Wannabe’
• Post-Amalgamation Identity Crisis
– 1998-2005
• ‘Toronto the Good’ …. ‘Toronto the
BORING’
• SARS Crisis 2003 – tourism, investment down
• Diversity, increasing immigration
• Need for a cohesive narrative
– ‘Brand Strategy’ offered as a solution
A Strategic Branding Approach…
A partnership with the Ontario Ministry of Tourism and Recreation,
the City of Toronto, and the Toronto City Summit Alliance
• $4 million project included local and international focus groups, surveys and
interviews
– Website presence – [Link]
– 4,500 responses gathered
• Stakeholder/Community engagement
– All the stakeholders involved in the project were told to use the new brand in their
marketing, communications and product development.
• Brand strategy was developed by Brand Architecture International of New
York City and TBWA of Toronto.
• The branding materials included an overall Toronto Unlimited logo, which
consists of a stylized letter "T" that forms a circle with itself, plus five icons in
the same style representing music, food, film, festivals and the arts.
• “we needed to do a better job of marrying the brand promise to the
marketplace. And the new brand, Toronto Unlimited, is not geared solely
for tourism but for economic development and investment in the city of
Toronto as well.”
• Tourism Toronto CEO
”it will celebrate the infinite potential of the people and the endless
opportunities they offer the city."
… and an absolute failure.
• “too vague, ineffectual”
(Branding expert, University of Toronto)
• “The campaign had an inbuilt ambiguity… the
more it tried to be all things to all people, the
more it lost every shred of legitimacy. You
can't define a city through branding.”
(Nation Branding expert, New York University)
• “...more than embarrassing. It is all out
excruciating.” (Toronto Star journalist)
Meanwhile…
Building Toronto the ‘The Creative City’ was underway
Nuit Blanche
• ‘Live With Culture’ come to life
• Art in the streets, at night, accessible to all
• Supported by corporate sponsorship
• Backed by institutional partnerships
• Promoted heavily internationally
• Celebrated the city – the people, the artists, the
architecture, the geography, the ‘vibe’
Culture as economic driver
•Festivals, events
• Nuit Blanche, Luminato, Pan Am Games 2015
• Night-time, weekend economies
• International profile
• $25/pp arts budget as policy priority
• Billboard tax for arts
• Corporate Sponsorship
• Agenda for Prosperity, Creative City Strategy,
Culture Plan for a Creative City… etc.
• Economic impact = tourism driver
Culture as unifier
• Torontonians began to believe in Toronto
• Attendance up at institutions, events,
community engagement
• Media accolades, think pieces
• Civic pride
– Disbelief > Participation > Exaltation
PanAmania
‘Branding
the city’
Iconic
landmark
Destination,
photo-opp
Leveraging
Event Space
Cultural Success Story
• Tourism numbers up year over year
• Vibe at PanAmania was insane
• Immigration: > 100,000 new arrivals annually
• Festival/Event calendar bursting
• Sense that the city is coming into its own
Recent Rankings
• #1 best place to live in the world
– The Economist, based on 6 of its indexes. (2015)
• #1 most liveable city in the world
– Metropolis, an architecture and design publication. (2015)
• #3 PWC’s Cities of Opportunity Index (2016)
• #4 KPMG Global Competitiveness Report (2016)
The ICON Model of Place Branding
The ICON model
(Dinnie, 2016, p. 253)
proposes that good
practice in place
branding is
characterized by
adopting an approach
that is:
Integrated
Contextualized
Organic
New
19
Integrated
• The integrated dimension of the model calls
for:
– inter-agency collaboration
– the development of public-private sector
programmes
20
Inter-agency collaboration
• A natural setting for the encouragement of inter-agency
collaboration lies in a city’s network of municipal, arm’s
length and non-profit agencies
• City representatives (in economic development, trade and
investment, tourism, culture, and so on) can come
together and initiate city branding activities through
various initiatives locally and internationally
• However, there is wide variation in the degree of
commitment in this regard, and a wariness in some
quarters towards the risk of ‘institutionalizing’
coordination
21
De-Centralised, Collaborative
• “I don’t think we can really think of government as the author
of these things. In many different respects we don’t have that
kind of singular agency to do something on our own, so we’re
always collaborative, and always working with partners, and
always working with opportunities. So I think it’s sort of the
same thing about creating a narrative around policy - to be as
open and transparent as possible about it so that other
people can interpret it to work for them.”
- Senior Policy Advisor, Economic Development
22
Public-private, inter-agency
co-operation
• “So the key players - the universities are out there selling Toronto to students. They’re
selling Toronto to the film industry. Tourism Toronto is selling the city to tourists. Invest
Toronto is selling it to potential foreign-directed investors. And industries throughout the
city - places like MARS, or the province - there’s so many people who have a stake in
making Toronto work. And they should all be telling the same story. They should all have
the same thread of the same narrative. Not the total story, but understand how their
narrative fits into the broader one.”
- Marketing Manager, Culture and Economic Development
• “Most of the work is through the Municipality or the municipal equivalent. To do it best it
needs to be very integrative. You’ve got economics, you’ve got to understand the market,
you’ve got an understanding of the proximity to other amenities, you’ve got to understand
all the organizations that are affected to drive it, to put the pieces together. It’s a new way
of thinking about urbanism.”
- Former Director of Tourism, Municipal Planner
23
Contextualized
• The contextualized dimension of the model
draws attention to:
– the need to ensure relevance to stakeholder
needs and capabilities
– the importance of matching the values of target
audiences
24
Relevance to stakeholder
needs and capabilities
• “I can’t say that one stakeholder is bigger than the other. It’s
really the larger cultural sector. And then the City. So people
who live and work here. They have to feel that this connects
with how they want to live and how they choose to live in TO.
If it doesn’t reach out and connect with the bigger broader
sense of itself, then it’s not going to work.”
- Senior Policy Analyst, Economic Development
25
Matching the values of target
audiences
• This implies granting a reasonable degree of empowerment to
professionals on the ground, such as marketing,
communications and PR staff in DMOs, so that the city brand
is customized appropriately to the values of local populations
and target audiences
“There’s not one core brand identity we promote for Toronto - it
all depends on who we’re talking to, what story we’re trying to
get out of it, and who we’re pitching.”
- Director, Communications, Tourism Toronto
26
• “Two things were happening at the same time. We were trying to
redefine ourselves. And we were taking a broader view of what culture
means. So its the arts, but it’s also cultural industries, it’s also heritage,
and all the things the city actually touches. So we’re trying to look at
that broad lens and also organise ourselves structurally, like how is this
going to operate? These questions gave us the opportunity to start
with a blank sheet of paper. How do we do this? What does it even
mean? At the same time, the community was concerned about being
left behind in this huge beast. That there wouldn’t be a strong enough
voice for culture. So a lot of traditional differences that would have
been there between people in the arts community and the heritage
community and even within parts of the arts community disappeared.
So you could do consultations and people would actually engage with
you and they would come together. The Culture Plan was an attempt to
show that broad scope.”
- Director, Culture, City of Toronto27
Organic
• The organic dimension of the model
advocates:
– a blend of planned and unplanned activities
– policy should be rooted in the place’s identity and
culture
28
• “…That’s what I find a lot of cities are doing. They obviously
have to promote basic cultural assets – civic museums, civic
theatres, public gardens, festivals. There’s almost an
obligation for them to promote their core basic offerings
that most cities have. But while they’re doing that, the
bigger change - the Florida ‘Creative Class’ stuff - is to
change the culture internally so that moving ahead as cities
develop and grow, they’re actually incorporating cultural
impact as a decision-maker. It is a pillar they must consider
early in the game.”
- Former Sponsorship Supervisor,
Director of Cultural Programs, Hamilton
29
Blend of planned
and unplanned activities
• There is an organic dimension to place branding that should
be welcomed by policy makers rather than resented
• A place brand evolves not according to a tightly controlled
master plan, but subject to a plethora of activities and
incidents that may be planned or unplanned
30
• “Toronto prior to 1998 was six different municipalities, each
with their own programs and own identity. All came together
because the province made us come together. Not what we
wanted, it was about them. So we had to figure that out. So
part of the branding exercise and the desire to have a plan
and develop the cultural model, was thinking through what is
this new Toronto? A lot of it had its foundation in accident of
history where we were struggling to figure out what the new
place was.”
- Former Director of Tourism, Urban Planner
31
Rooted in the place’s
identity and culture
• Many unplanned elements will emerge organically from the
place’s identity and culture in the form of books, films,
sporting performances, music and art that make an impact on
perceptions of a place
32
• “I think that over time … we kind of reflect or identify
emerging issues or see best practices from elsewhere and
reflect what our community wants to do and try to implement
it. So it’s a little bit a kind of thinking ahead and
implementation and then seeing where we are. So it’s an ever-
evolving thing… But most things start small and grow over
time. So what we try to do is celebrate what’s unique about
Toronto. We try to tell our own stories, we try to invest in our
museums, our heritage. That’s why I think the nonprofit
culture sector is extremely important in developing our
identity. That’s what’s different from other places.”
- Senior Policy Advisor, Economic Development
33
New
• The new dimension of the model emphasises:
– the need for innovative products, services and
experiences
– the potential for creating new place-related
narratives
34
Innovative products, services
and experiences
• “…You always have to stay current on what’s new, what’s happening. A lot of
journalists in the travel industry ask, ‘what’s new, what’s hot’ - and a lot of these
journalists are people who have covered Toronto repeatedly. So that’s why we
always need to figure out, ‘what’s the new bar, new club, new lounge, new
restaurant’? We call on a lot of our partners - whether they represent somebody,
or know somebody, or work for somebody that might have something new going
on. We’re always looking, for example, for the odd, the unique, the general
research information questions. But that’s the key - research, research, research.
We’re constantly looking and reading what other people are covering as well, to
find out what they’re covering, whether it’s local or international, to see what
some of our journalists are covering in other destinations, and how long ago it
was, and how long it’s been since they’ve covered the destination if they have at
all. … Pretty much 98% of the time, we’re able to throw in that off the beat, not
originally asked for, we can sway them and come up with multiple stories. We like
to think of ourselves as creative, and leaders of sorts in terms of shaping the
story of a major cosmopolitan destination.”
- Director, Communications, Tourism Toronto
35
New place-related narratives
• To be noteworthy and interesting for domestic and
international audiences, a place brand should deliver
something that is new
• This could entail the creation of new place-related
narratives
36
New place-making narratives
37
38
• “It really has amazing me how fast The Six has become
the name for Toronto. You can maybe say it’s similar to
TDot. But even that doesn’t seem to have taken off at
the same level. That one felt more specifically linked to
hip hop. Maybe that was just about the media
environment and music environment at the time. But
The Six really seems to have entered into the dialect,
our consciousness, more deeply. Other people are using
it, and we’re all using it too. It really seems to have
settled in.”
– Music/Culture Critic, NOW Magazine
39
[Link]
40
Take Aways
• Organic Approach
– Ears/Eyes to the ground … working with existing assets, and
creating new cultural touchpoints
– Activating pride through engagement
– A call to action
• Depends on local participation and collaboration
• Promotional Principles
– Consumer Insight to guide decision-making
– Consistency over time
– Integration of promotion into politics, planning
– Less focus on brandmark, more focus on brand promise
Questions?
Giannina Warren
Lecturer, Advertising and Promotional Culture
Middlesex University London
[Link]@[Link]
@giannina_w