$2.3-million bid for Expo 2017 a bargain if it boosts Edmonton's image
Passing up a key branding opportunity to polish off a growing list of infrastructure projects is shortsighted
Todd Babiak
The Edmonton Journal
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
A couple of my friends recently travelled to Green Bay, Wis., to watch a Packers game. They attended tailgate parties, bought cheese-shaped hats and visited the statues and other hallowed grounds in and around Lambeau Field -- a structure that has only been in existence since 1957, yet resonates with emotion and mythology. For an afternoon, they also drove to Milwaukee, a city they knew only from the Brewers baseball team and reruns of Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley.
In their minds, it was a small and ugly city, working-class and unremarkable. Sitcoms about ordinary people took place in Milwaukee because it was iconically, and comically, ordinary. Yet Milwaukee shocked them with its size, its grandness and its beauty.
Milwaukee, like Edmonton, is a city in need of a successful marketing campaign -- a brand. This is why it makes so much sense to spend $2.3 million, now, on a bid for Expo 2017. It forces Edmonton, finally, to create and preserve an idea of itself that sings. Not the city of champions or gateway to anywhere or festival city, of which there are already scores. An idea that springs forth from Edmontonians, as truth, and travels.
"A city definitely needs to worry about its image," says Adam Finn, a marketing and economics professor at U of A's Alberta School of Business. "It has an impact on bringing skilled people to a city, on investment, on tourism. It's also important for citizens, that they can feel proud about a city. If you don't think about the sort of image you're creating, you'll probably end up with one you don't particularly want."
Finn says investing in an image is essential. However, not every investment is a good investment. No doubt, Milwaukee has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on branding. Yet according to the clash between my friends' prior conceptions and their actual experience, and based on a visit to their unremarkable City of Milwaukee website, it hasn't worked astonishingly well. But if a company, a city, a province or a nation doesn't take a risk, rewards are impossible.
Today, Americans are set to take a risk on a black, 47-year-old first-term junior senator whose middle name is Hussein, even though they're in desperately poor financial shape. Milwaukee's failures notwithstanding, America is the greatest brand in world history. In recent years, that brand has been severely damaged. The "change" Americans are poised to make is as much an image change as anything else, and it's tremendously exciting.
That capacity for hope, for change, for risk-taking, is not historically a Canadian trait. We usually see it as naive or overreaching. Canadians are equally suspicious about mythology; we have nothing in the country equivalent to Lambeau Field, let alone the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Under the current Conservative government, we're the only developed country in the world without a cultural diplomacy program.
If Canadians are reluctant to worry about their brand, Edmontonians are downright squeamish. Why waste money on sentimentality and abstraction when there's an overpass at 23rd Avenue that hasn't been built?
City council's decision to pursue Expo 2017, a 90-day festival to celebrate Canada's 150th anniversary and an opportunity for Edmonton and Alberta to present a coherent physical and emotional image to the world, is a clear indication that we understand our challenges. Like Americans lining up to vote today, we recognize that something profound isn't working.
To balk at the price tag because our municipal taxes are going up, or because oil could stabilize at $70 to $90 a barrel instead of $147, is the sort of thinking that has us stalled in this state today: The richest place in the world you've never heard of.
When Finn travels, and self-identifies as a professor at the University of Alberta, people -- even Canadians -- assume the school is in Calgary. Not that Calgary couldn't use some work.
In the 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, an executive is punished in the worst way imaginable, by being shipped off from Houston to the company's office in Calgary. This bit of information is presented with an image of a blizzard and a man walking down a freeway with a jerry can in his hand.
That said, Finn isn't a booster for Expo 2017. "I think they've declined in importance," he says.
"An expo is a thing of the 19th and 20th centuries, not of the 21st, when so much information is available on the Internet and so many of us travel around the world."
It's true that a failed expo would be devastating to Edmonton's fragile reputation. But a perfect expo, a modestly spectacular reimagining of what Edmontonians are and what they could be, would be worth the price of an overpass.
tbabiak@thejournal.canwest.com
© The Edmonton Journal 2008
Copyright © 2008 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://www.canada.com/components/pri...b48b6&sponsor=
Prev
Linear Mode
