Branding a city

Like any good product there is a strategic marketing campaign behind it. There is brand consistency, no mixed messages and a clear concise message the product is making to the consumer to ensure there is no confusion over what they are purchasing and why.
Like any good product, there are testimonials and feedback ensuring necessary changes to tweak that product are made to create that demand for even more consumers to need, want and use that one thing that has brought so many others satisfaction, consistency and reliability.
A city is a product. It is used daily by millions, has a need, a want and like many other great products, has its flaws.
Great cities have great needs, most have learned from their mistakes, and others haven’t. This tends to be a great flaw with people running those cities unsure as to why these flaws occur. Like that great product, it takes time to create that customer base, who have used it so many times in the past and told their friends how incredible it was to use, and how they too can benefit from its use.
Toronto has become a victim of that “growing up too fast syndrome”, starting off as a city that just has every great structure in place, systematically making sure that all the necessary infrastructure is where it should be, rich in history, consistency, a few flaws-but those flaws gave it character in the right ways. This product is now being used by consumers that 25 years ago was not planned for. The growth ballooned, development went awry, and the city that once worked, became the city that couldn’t keep up.
With mixed messages and inconsistency at so many levels, Toronto the product is being used daily with uncertainty as to whether or not it will get you from a to b on time. Its still a great product-if used properly, but those necessary changes to tweak the city need to happen on a bigger level.
Toronto just came out of one of its worse years for tourism (even worse than the SARS year). A garbage strike still fresh in peoples mind, and the infrastructure crumbling beneath the feet of people (literally), there are great things ahead for the future of Toronto-But we shouldn’t rest on those laurels.
The G20 summit is coming in the summer of 2010, World Pride in 2014, and the Pan Am games in 2015. Tourists come to Toronto expecting culture, diversity and history. When they get here, they have street signs that aren’t consistent, sidewalks that are a mess, and a transit system that has their staff sleeping on the job.
As a child, I grew up with street signs downtown that were lit up either in yellow or blue. This was a clear indication for not only the residents but the tourists, if the sign was yellow, that street ran east to west, if the sign was blue, it was pointed at the lake. It’s a little thing I know, but it was consistent. To ensure those testimonials are great ones, we need to fix the inconsistencies now, and create that demand for the great product we know as Toronto.