The battle of the brands

11:55am Sunday 17th February 2008

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By Peter Law »

ASK most people to summarise Southampton in a few words and they're likely to say "Titanic and the docks" - though that might be closely followed by "Saints, shopping and chavs".

With the world getting ever smaller, Southampton's civic, education and business leaders know the city's identity is crucial to its future success.

Which is why they have worked together for the past couple of years to carefully craft what it means to visit or live and work in Southampton.

The result will be revealed next month when Southampton is given a new slogan that will be emblazoned on 18 welcome signs at entry points to the city.

Train passengers and motorists arriving from across Britain are to be greeted with the message "Welcome to Southampton: International maritime city" in a new drive to promote the city, the Daily Echo can reveal.

The Southampton Partnership, the strategy group behind the marketing campaign, says the slogan is just a small part of its plan to update the city's image.

However, the region's tourism chiefs say a slogan or logo can be vital to how cities are perceived by outsiders.

Its importance was highlighted yesterday when it was revealed the University of Southampton had spent £160,000 changing its logo - ditching the famous dolphin in favour of plain text.

Students and unions criticised the controversial change that comes at a time of redundancies and cutbacks.

Summarising a town, city, county or even an entire nation in just one sentence can be fraught with danger and while there are thousands to choose from, some are more memorable than others.

Canada once had a campaign asking Americans to "Come see our beavers", while Hong Kong has rarely used "will take your breath away" since the SARS outbreak.

A row erupted north of the border late last year when it was announced £125,000 had been spent on a new welcome sign slogan that simply said "Welcome to Scotland".

Locals in Nottinghamshire were outraged when their old campaign "Our style is legendary" was replaced with a single letter: "N", while Australia's "Where the bloody hell are you?"

was banned by British authorities.

Portsmouth is going through its own makeover and is now being marketed as the "Premier waterfront city".

Nigel Smith, Tourism South East commercial services director, said a slogan helped create an immediately recognisable identity.

He said the new slogan strengthened Southampton's established reputation as a major working port and said creating an entirely new brand would have cost millions.

"Obviously they are trying to strengthen the image that probably a lot of people have of Southampton," he said.

"If you went to Manchester and asked people to give one word which says Southampton, they would probably pick the port."

At least £100,000 has so far been spent on Southampton's brand makeover, but the welcome signs and accompanying slogan were created inhouse at the city council.

Funding for the 18 signs - which will cost £25,000 - has come from the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) and was allocated by the Southampton Partnership.

The current batch of signs, which say "Welcome to Southampton", were only replaced a few years ago, but have been described as embarrassing by critics.

Past signs have proudly proclaimed "Welcome to the home of ocean sailing", "The gateway to the Empire" and "The airbase of the Empire".

Sicco Vangelder - whose consultancy firm Placebrands developed a marketing strategy for Southampton - said British cities had suffered an identity crisis over the past decade.

Mr Vangelder said Southampton should forget about competing with south coast rival Portsmouth and set its sights higher by taking inspiration from other great waterfront cities.

"We said often during our review process that Portsmouth is often the bogeyman, but we believe it's important to set your sights higher and further away," he said.

"You should compete with cities such as Vigo in Spain, which hosts the start of the World Ocean Race, or Gothenburg (in Sweden) which hosted its finish."

Mr Vangelder said developing key messages about the aspirations of the city was more important than slogans or logos.

"We found that Southampton's future is not so much the sea - the real future of the city is in its brainpower," he said, "Southampton has a wonderful opportunity with its education sector, with two universities, a number of higher education and research institutions.

"Obviously the seagoing heritage of Southampton stretches back to Roman times, but the question is how many people are actually employed in this sector?

How much of it is actually contributing to the local economy?

"Those questions led us to decide that the place needs to find its future in a different way."

Mrs Cassy said the city's key stakeholders had embraced that theme and said "innovation and creativity"

would define Southampton.

"Quite a lot of cities have got into a kind of competition and if we want people to come and live or work here they need to know why they should do that," she said.

"There are lots of places with logos and slogans but we've taken a much more in-depth view of the whole city, its identity and aspiration.

"We are a city of innovation and creativity, great things have been created here in the past so we are building on our great heritage, but Southampton also has a strong creativity industry today."