Regina's rebrand attracts foreign attention
Nathan Morrison didn't think he was making a sales pitch.
In early 2012, the city's brand manager made a brief presentation before a group of visiting municipal officials and politicians from Ukraine on how his team approached Regina's rebrand, which launched three years ago.
Morrison thought that was it, until he received a call to travel to the Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, which was interested in launching its own branding exercise. Nearly two years later, the city is ready to roll out its new marketing strategy.
"It's a neat initiative," said Morrison, the City of Regina's head of branding and marketing since 2008.
"I'm certainly flattered that they thought enough of the things that we were doing here to go. I had certainly never been to Eastern Europe, so I was also attracted from that perspective."
The initiative is part of the multi-million-dollar Ukraine Municipal Local Economic Development program put on by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. A number of Ukrainian cities pair up and learn from their Canadian counterparts in such areas as municipal marketing and economic development.
Morrison's visit in May 2012 turned into three trips in total, culminating in senior officials from Kryvyi Rih, located in central Ukraine, visiting Regina and other Saskatchewan cities last week. One of the differences between municipal governments in North America and Eastern Europe, Morrison found, is that cities here more actively "tell their stories", whether it's promoting the local economy or playing up quality of life. Engaging with citizens through such social networks as Twitter and Facebook has become paramount, Morrison said, and naturally became a popular topic of conversation when the Regina team was advising its Ukrainian counterparts over the last year.
"Just in terms of community branding and marketing and communications, those are things that they don't do a whole lot of," he said. "They do a little bit, but maybe it's not as sophisticated as things are here for a lot of economic and political reasons. So we had to talk to them about why we would do that overall, and then we talked to them about how you would go about developing your own brand and getting it off the ground."
It seems the City of Regina is capitalizing on the success of its $320,000 rebrand three years ago, which featured a new logo and the tagline "Infinite Horizons". Though hard to quantify how a new municipal marketing campaign contributes to population growth and investment, Mayor Michael Fougere said the fresh campaign was worth it.
"We see opportunities and (rebranding) is a good way to portray that. It's positioned us very well for lots of growth, and we're ready for growth," Fougere said.
"(Working with the City of Kryvyi Rih) says we did something right, and that the rebranding works, because other people outside our city recognize that. Now this may be just for the purposes of rebranding, but Regina is on the map at doing this kind of thing right around the world. Other cities, other municipalities see the need to do this, and I think we did the right thing."