A Unified Vision: Elevating Political Stability Through Government Branding
Discover how strategic branding can align community leaders, drive governance, and secure a legacy of credibility
We take step two in our journey on government branding with additional thoughts on its powerful political value.
The first thought is this: a great brand is good politics. Because it’s a sign of outstanding governance, i.e., it shows the world you’ve got your act together.
“The brand is about creating confidence in decision making,” says Will Ketchum, president and CEO of North Star, a branding and marketing company that works with local governments. “That’s what good brand messaging does. It’s a guide to confident. … If you achieve a solid brand, you’re giving your consumer a guide to confident consumption and that’s what every business has to do, and every place has to do today.”
Confidence grows when residents see consistency in the kinds of decisions being made by elected officials that are “on brand.” Recall that the most important aspect of a strong brand is that it is authentic. It is true to the place, to the community. You know what telling the truth does, right? It builds credibility with the public. There’s not a government agency alive that couldn’t use more of that.
Here’s something I hadn’t really considered until I was talking to comms goddess CoCo Good of the City of McKinney, Texas, for this series: A strong brand helps create political stability. And when you have a consistent political philosophy of elected leadership that spans decades, it’s amazing what you can accomplish. We saw it in the wildly successful downtown projects GGF profiled in Lenexa, Kansas, and Oak Creek, Wisconsin, that took a decade or more to come to fruition.
CoCo was recalling the hard work of establishing McKinney’s brand some 20 years ago. The brand tagline is “Unique by nature,” a nod to the community’s natural beauty as well as its quirkiness.
“The council at the time said to me, ‘Well, how long will this be our brand?’” CoCo said. “And my answer was, this will be our brand as long as you continue to make decisions that make us a unique and different — inherently different — community. If we’re no longer that, then this would not be the brand anymore.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Good Government Files to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.