A move is underway at City Hall to re-brand El Paso with the tag-line “Capital of the Border.” You may have read about it here, like I did. I like the line. It captures El Paso's essential differentiating quality, our Unique Selling Proposition, as the place where two cultures meet and mingle, collide and mesh.
Culturally, El Paso is as unique as New Orleans or San Francisco or Miami. Miami is occasionally labeled as the Capital of South America. El Paso has more in common with Miami than with New Orleans or San Francisco. But Miami, with its large population of Cubans and Puerto Ricans, isn't much like El Paso. In truth, there is no place in the world that is much like El Paso.
For a long time, we've ignored our border heritage. We've tried to be another kind of city. We've tried to be like Phoenix, or Tucson, or Albuquerque, or sometimes like San Antonio. We've held ourself up to those cities for comparison, and we've come up short. We've been self-effacing. Humble. Even ashamed. Vergonzoso. We've turned our back on the border. We've acted like if we ignored it, we could pretend it wasn't there. And it sat there like a corpse at the dinner table, and we'd pass the peas in front of it and hope the dinner guests would be too polite to mention it.
Because the border's not always pretty. There's consistently a huge criminal syndicate on the other side, operating with what amounts to impunity. There’s all that poverty and crime, the slums and shantytowns and murder and theft. Poor and dirty are qualities we’ve tried to sweep under the rug. And now Juarez is suffering gang wars, public executions and dead bodies rolled up in blankets like macabre burritos.
But, pretty or not, El Paso is tied to Juarez like she’s our crazy Siamese twin. We can’t just pretend she’s not there.
The most successful city branding proposition in recent years is Las Vegas' “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” At the time that initiative was launched, Las Vegas had been trying to reinvent itself as family friendly. It was selling itself more as Disneyland and trying to shed its Sin City reputation. To capitalize on the new tag-line, the hotels and casinos had to reorient their individual promotions to maximize the value of the new campaign.
When the line was introduced to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau, it was greeted by “icy silence,” according to this story on brandchannel.com. [link]
But to their credit, the LVCVB tested the line and adopted it, resulting in a record 38.5 million visitors in 2005.
Does El Paso have the political will to adopt a branding initiative that might be unpopular to a large number of its citizens? Will the El Paso Convention and Visitors Bureau adopt a Unique Selling Proposition that might be contrary to some El Pasoans self-concept?
(In the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that I've written and been paid for a number of stories for the EPCVB's official Visitor's Guide.)
But a tag-line isn't a brand identity. Strong brands are infused with their brand identity down to the molecular level. At the very least, the brand initiative needs to engage the intended constituency.
If the goal of the branding initiative is to lure conventions and visitors, then all the tourist facilities should tie into the border theme. Hotels and restaurants should embrace our geocultural orientation. Mariachis should play in hotel lobbies while margaritas flow. Any hotel that's a clone of its corporate cousin will need to be re-oriented.
Some local businesses won't need any modification at all, because they already represent the border. I'll wager there are few Holiday Inn Expresses in the country with as Mexican a color scheme as the one in Downtown El Paso.
UTEP has already embraced the role of a border university. Three years ago the regents approved a Master's degree in Latin American and Border Studies, and a number of the colleges offer classes with a focus on the border.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that I was, for a semester, a Master’s candidate and an employee of the Institute for Latin American and Border Studies.)
We can take the border theme beyond restaurants and hotels. We can accept the totality of our border existence. We can become the focal point for all issues borderesque. We can host seminars, moderate discussions, and voice opinions. To achieve a strong brand presence, we should insert ourselves into every public discourse regarding the border, so that the concept “the border” is linked in the public’s mind with the concept “El Paso.”
Adopting, or radically changing, a brand strategy is not usually easy. I have, recently, given informal branding consultations with a couple of professional services firms, and though both voiced support for the need for a strong branding strategy, neither has, so far, been able to exert the will to pull to it off. Public awareness isn’t a calm pool to be waded into. The tide of public opinion is constantly changing. A new idea had better be a strong swimmer. Can the city make it happen?
