Over at Moving Brands they are trying to win a tender for a new brand for London by engaging in crowdsourcing. I feel quite sceptical to this exercise as it’s just so full of contradictions. To express the diversity, the history and the ambition of London, you have to settle on one view of diversity, one reading of the history and one vision of the future. In branding a city a region or a country, you are bound to engage in cliches and thereby cementing them. The brand has to be recognisable, so you resort to established, iconic imagery. While you may be successful in expressing and/or changing some external perceptions, it’s a very different game from building a brand that changes or expresses internal perceptions.
In his proposal for a branding exercise - a sort of general mobilisation that somewhat naively seem to view Twitter as the single most powerful channel for engaging in discourse - Scott Thomas suggests the tagline “I am London” and invites all Londoners to wear badges and T-shirts and apparel with this tagline. Basically asking a city of differences, of 7,5 million identities, to wear a uniform. The idea undermines its own basic idea, that the citizens of London make London. Not because they aspire to the same, wear the same or think the same, but exactly because they are and can express their differences. Perhaps a simple change to “You are London” would go some way to address this issue, as it would be an act of extrovert affirmation to wear for instance a T-shirt with this printed on the front. It would feel like an invitation to conversations, a welcome to visitors.
So in an act of complete contradicton, here’s my proposal for a new brand for London:
I’m on London.
My idea is to create a brand new next-generation Speaker’s Corner. More in tune with today’s channels of dissemination, it’s a digital one.
The brand tagline: “I’m on London.”
It’s a website, a hashtag, a rallying call, anything you want it to be.
It’s also a physical place. I suggest creating this by closing off Picadilly Circus to traffic and turning it into a giant interactive space. Allow people to send all kinds of messages (email, sms, twitter, videos, etc.) that are displayed on the giant LED / Video displays. “I’m on London” provides various channels, for different kinds of discourses. For the benefit of people without access to supported devices, London is fitted with “I’m on London” booths; small interactive kiosks that allow you to record, write and send off messages to the new Speaker’s Corner.
All email messages sent from the account of the Mayor of London are being displayed in real-time. Your messages too.
London itself becomes a channel for people to let their voices be heard.
In a manner symptomatic of our age, people and businesses do not only want to be in London, they now want to be able to say: “I’m on London.”
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Update: I just discovered Saffron’s work on “Visit London”. To me, this is spot-on. It works in both directions, both externally and internally, by avoiding cliches and interpretations, and foregrounding ‘factoids’. Brilliant!
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