St. Louis works to develop a brand

ST. LOUIS -- St. Louis wants to make a memorable impression, so a new brand image was unveiled for the city on Tuesday, like many a consumer product before it.

It's a bit of a play on the city's name, with the wording, "St. Lou is all within reach," and includes a graphic representation of the Gateway Arch bridging the intentional space in the St. Louis wording.

The St. Louis brand was announced at the annual meeting of the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission. The organization's president, Kitty Ratcliffe, said the brand is meant to capture the essence of the city and region. Brands are associations people have with a name, and the brand image will be used to set St. Louis apart from other groups and communities in promotional campaigns.

Ratcliffe said it was important to include the Gateway Arch as part of the brand. The shimmering monument is the symbol most identified with the city and has worldwide recognition.

"It is our Eiffel Tower. It is our Nike swoosh," she said.

But one problem with past images tying St. Louis to the idea of being the Gateway City is that it "implies a gateway you step through on your way to somewhere else," Ratcliffe said.

St. Louis is dogged by a high-crime reputation that city and tourism officials have strenuously refuted in the past.

Mayor Francis Slay believes the brand will help people locally feel good about where they live and get word of the city's positive traits out to others.

"We've got a lot of big-city attributes with the comforts and convenience of a smaller city," Slay said.

The brand aims to tie into the notion that St. Louis has exceptional attractions, like its sports teams, architecture, museums and parks, but a lower cost of living and fewer hassles than some bigger cities.

Ratcliffe said about $750,000 had been spent to roll out the brand and for a related advertising campaign that will run from around Thanksgiving to Valentine's Day, encouraging people to visit St. Louis in the winter. That campaign will run in Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma, Iowa, Tennessee and Indiana.

The majority of funding for the branding project came from hotel taxes, with contributions from the hotel and attractions associations and member businesses, she said.

Ratcliffe said with a destination brand, it's difficult to find one that everyone agrees on. She said the key to successful efforts like "I Love New York" or "Virginia is for Lovers" is that those brands were used consistently, even if not everyone loved them at first. She said the new St. Louis branding had tested well among several groups.

Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois, said cities like New York and Las Vegas have had great success branding themselves. Others, like Atlanta, are working hard to get their brand image out. The efforts go far beyond slogans, to all the associations people have with a city, he said.