Marc Haine describes a brand leadership exercise where city names were hidden and ads became indistinguishable. He argues that generic messaging like "a great place to live, work, and play" makes you invisible. Distinctive branding requires specificity, not sameness.
I was chair of the brand leadership team. And we went through this exercise of tourism-related, trying to get people to visit. And in that exercise was this moment where they shared all of these images of different tourism ads. And it was the definitive, a great place to live, work, and play. And in this exercise, they actually blanked out the city name. The joke was, can you guess where this is? And Everyone was using it. And I share that as an example of try to avoid that. Try to avoid the whatever it is that you come up with, that moment when, you know, our organization or our show name don't make it a great place to live, work, and play.
