Friday, February 03, 2006
How Hard Can it Be?
I saw the other day that Gainesville is looking to create a brand identity to generate tourism in the area. Their initial budget to a marketing agency to execute a concept is $20,000, an amount I admit makes me drool and makes me wish I was in on the bidding process. But this response makes me mad. I admit, what she said made sense to me, until her last paragraph.
This is not some complicated engineering project. All it takes is a catchy phrase or logo. We could possibly save a lot of taxpayer money, which could then be spent on beautification projects.Let's be entirely realistic here. Although $20,000 is more than any project we've undertaken at our business, it's a small sum compared to most large scale advertising campaigns, and it is a reasonable cost for the intensive market studies, competition research, and focus groups that will be undertaken to hone done on an effective message. Not to mention the hundreds of hours that will put into executing several effective concepts for consideration. Laypersons always distill the creative process down to a stroke of luck. A 'catchy phrase or logo' is not often conjured out of thin air, and even if it is, it takes some refinement to execute it correctly (color choices, sizes, font selections, etc). Yes, it might not be as complicated as an engineering project. But $20,000 might buy you two days of a bulldozer's time, or cover the cost of planting two trees in a beautification project. It's really a drop in the bucket for a marketing message that, if properly executed, will be usable by the county for five to ten years.
------------------------------------------------