[ Baltimore: To Be Determined ]

Behind our offices there used to be a giant mural. It featured the bricks of our building melding into a stage curtain, which in turn parted to reveal the prow of the USS Constellation. The ship cut through churning water. The Inner Harbor stood proud in the background.

Actually, the mural is still there; it’s just hidden. No longer visible to cars streaming toward Baltimore’s stadiums, the mural is now part of an alley behind a new building that will house...whatever. And while new construction should be welcomed for the jobs, opportunity, and sheer energy it brings to our city, it’s sad to see this proud image of Baltimore’s sailing past covered up.

But it’s our present image that currently concerns us. By now you’ve probably had more than enough time to digest (or forget) last summer’s much ado about the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association’s tourism slogan. Bright and cheery ads, banners, and a website all trumpeted, “Baltimore: Get in on it.” From almost the moment it appeared, reactions to the campaign were...mixed, to put it kindly.

In an editorial, the Baltimore Business Journal’s Joanna Sullivan blamed the widespread resistance to the branding effort on Baltimore’s continuing “inferiority complex.” We respectfully must disagree: you can love a city and still loathe its tagline. (Similarly, Cornerstone practically runs on Diet Coke...but we vastly prefer The New Seekers teaching the world to sing in 1971 to G. Love teaching the world to “chill” in 2005.)

Meghana Kulkarni, in The Urbanite’s August 2006 issue, summed up the campaign’s central problem in a nutshell: “Seems like we answered the question, ‘What do we have that everyone else has too?’” Of the 14 icons that make up the logo, at least eight are generic to any large town, let alone a world-class city. As for the tagline, what specifically are we supposed to be getting in on? Kulkarni wisely notes
that a successful civic slogan, whether official (“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”) or controversial (“Keep Austin Weird”), emblazons its city with one distinctive notion, from which the rest of its character can be extrapolated.

BACVA’s mistake was in focusing on everything Baltimore has to offer – in their own words, “the totality of the Baltimore experience” – instead of focusing on what Baltimore is – the essence of the Baltimore experience. Branding is an act of peeling away layers to find the core. Slapping on a new facade (or 14) just obscures the central work.

True, last summer is long over; in fact this summer is speedily approaching. But what’s important is what you can glean from the debacle. After all, it’s easy to nod in agreement with these principles. It’s another to apply them – to focus the same coldly critical eye on your own advertising. Are you trumpeting all that you do, or what you do best? Are you merely establishing the credentials that put you in line with your competitors, or are you shouting what makes you unique?

Perhaps this test is the most telling: when you last circulated your marketing campaign for comments, did everyone point out what could still be excised? Or did they start dolloping things back in? Sometimes, everyone getting in on something doesn’t help. In the rush to answer dueling constituencies, you can forget to address who really matters: the audience.

Meanwhile, we’re glad a new building went up behind us. We wholeheartedly want what’s good for Baltimore. But we miss viewing our sailing mural, so emblematic of this historic city’s unique charm.

Huh. “Charm.” Now there’s an interesting notion to attach to a city. Maybe one worth a campaign.