Branding in Government: Triumphs, Insights, and the Occasional Blunders

Sometimes the Road to Success is Paved with Donut Holes

Welcome back to our series on Government Branding. This edition is all about real-life examples — the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. From personal anecdotes of branding mishaps (yes, my own!) to a spotlight on innovative successes, we’re exploring what makes or breaks a public sector brand.

The Sweet: Downtown Donut Drop Success

We’ll start with one of my all-time favorite examples of a truly outstanding branding project. It shows what’s possible when you think outside the box about how to deliver productive messaging in the face of a difficult reality.

I bring you the Downtown Donut Drop.

Before we get too deep into the sweetness, let’s start with the problem. Downtown Round Rock was in the early years of a makeover. Like lots of cities in the 2010s, my former employer made a strategic priority to redevelop the downtown district into a true destination. I covered the details of how that transformation came about in this post. What I didn’t cover was how the branding and marketing for downtown came to life.

It became part of the portfolio at the city communications shop I led. Step 1 was to do what GGF suggests other governments do, which is to hire experts to chart a path forward on a branding program. We were in maybe the second year of implementing the brand plan — designed to position our downtown as a friendly, laid-back, down-home spot to grab a bite or do some shopping — when construction was about to kick off to deliver on another brand promise, that downtown was a “walkable” district.

The $13 million construction project would reconfigure the intersection at the heart of downtown from a five-way clusterfark to a traditional and much more pedestrian-friendly four-way intersection. Loyal readers will recall this description and graphic from that earlier post detailing the problems the master plan would solve:

The good news: when complete, the likelihood of killing Dan Burden or any other pedestrians at the intersection of Main Street and Mays Street would be greatly reduced. The bad news: it was gonna take 24 months of orange construction barrels, agonizingly long waits in traffic, annoying detours and copious amounts of dust before we could actually deliver the good news. The challenge was magnified by the fact “traffic” has been cited as the No. 1 concern of Round Rock residents in every biennial survey but one since 1998.