What’s in a Slogan?

“The City of Brotherly Love” just is Philadelphia. When you hear that phrase, cheesesteaks and the Liberty Bell pop into your head (even if you don’t know that’s what the city’s name means in Greek). It requires a bit more of a mental leap, however, to see how “Get In on It” connects to the city of Baltimore, or how “Every Day is Opening Day” has anything to do with Atlanta. The latter turns of phrase seem to lack a connection to the cities’ core identities, a detachment that is more and more common as cities—taking their cue from the corporate world—step up their efforts to build their brands and sum themselves up in short, catchy phrases.

Such sloganeering can be difficult and expensive. Last year Baltimore paid San Francisco-based Landor Associates $500,000 to come up with “Get In On It.” It took Seattle 16 months to come up with the $200,000 “Metronatural.” And the stakes in the game are increasingly high. A good slogan, city marketers say, can be responsible for everything from increasing tourism to luring large companies and new permanent residents. It’s a chance to either burnish a good reputation or diminish a bad one, and it helps to define the city, to both residents and outsiders alike. A brand that doesn’t do all this by playing to a city’s unique nature is not only self-defeating, but also a colossal waste of time and money.

A Brief History of the City Brand

Railroad companies may have been the earliest city marketers. As author Geoffrey Ward points out in his book Selling Places, Nebraska was sold to the public in 1881 as “a new brass key” that would “unlock vaults of wealth for the farmer and the stock raiser,” according to a railroad advertisement. The settling of the West by rail also led to cities competing to be the major hub of the heartland, a battle Chicago eventually won. These early efforts contained elements of the trend to follow: sell a place and its potential with a slick marketing image.

As streetcars spawned new suburbs in the late 19th century, the ‘burbs promoted themselves as respites from the evils of the city. In New York City, you could escape the dark, dirty, unhealthy urban experience for the pastoral charms of—Forest Hills in Queens. One brochure from the 1930s promised a refuge in Queens from the “canyons of trade and turmoil” to an abundance of “love, health, freedom of action; an environment of lawns, blossoming trees, trailing berry vines, roses, and the succulent vegetable bed.” All just a few stops away on the new Long Island Railroad.

Now, it’s the cities that must sell themselves in order to bring suburbanites back, and it helps to look at what’s worked and what hasn’t. Las Vegas suffered through several inappropriate campaigns before they came up with the runaway success “What happens here, stays here” in 2003. They experimented first with “It’s anything and everything” and “What you want. When you want.” Both were meant to help promote new family-friendly hotels of the mid-1990s and a general move towards Disney-esque family resorts. But they fared poorly because, to many, they rang false. According to the city, the “what happens here” campaign managed to bring a record 38.5 million visitors to the city in 2005 and a projected 39.1 million in 2006.

The City Too Busy to Hate: Atlanta

Atlanta has a long, proud history of selling itself, but it’s also a telling example of branding gone awry. Founded in 1836 as Terminus, named for its railway depot, and after a brief stint as Marthasville, it took on its current appellation in 1845. It’s been searching for a slogan ever since.

In the late 1800s it was the “Gate City” to the region and the “Chicago of the South.” After being named state capital in the late 1870s, Atlanta declared itself the “Capital of the New South.” The 1920s brought “Forward Atlanta,” a motto that attracted businesses and population. At mid-century came “The City Too Busy to Hate,” and, by the 1970s, Atlanta trumpeted itself as “The Next Great International City.” Despite this rich history of sloganeering, Atlanta has actually spent recent years without an official slogan. (Its unofficial nicknames are “Hotlanta” and “The Big Peach.”)

“Every day is an Opening Day,” an official slogan announced in late 2005, was accompanied by a new Atlanta logo and song. The logo plays up the ATL theme, making much of the city’s airport code (and giving a nod to its burgeoning rap scene). But the slogan itself seems nonsensical. It might just as easily apply to Manitowoc, Wisconsin as to Atlanta.

While irrelevant new mottos may give short-term boosts to CVBs everywhere, they often fail to represent the true identities of cities, which can be, frankly, embarrassing. As Maureen Atkinson, a senior partner at the Toronto-based Urban Marketing Collaborative, says of the current trend, “if there is nothing behind [these brands] and if they are not communicating a point of advantage, then they are not worth doing.”

City Slogans, Old and New

Atlantic City: America’s Favorite Playground(1993), Always Turned On (2003)
Cleveland: It’ll Rock You (1999)
See Something New (2005)
Dallas: The Texas Star (2000)
Live Large. Think Big. (2004)
Houston: The Real Texas (1993)
Expect the Unexpected (1997)
Chattanooga: The Attraction’s Only Natural (2002)
Rochester, MN: Rah-rah-
Rochester (2006)
Seattle: City of Flowers (1942)
Metronatural (2006)
Montreal: The More You Kiss,
the Frencher It Gets (2006)
Trenton, NJ: Trenton Makes. The World Takes (1910)
Tacoma: America’s No. 1 Wired City (2001)
Omaha: O! (2003)