Branding Raleigh to the World

The Pub
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I don’t really get all the fuss about needing a brand for a city. What is Nashville known for, shitty music and Doug the Pug? It’s a nice city tho.

People ask me all the time why I moved here. It’s not because it’s Disney World. I work in biotech and they have a lot of that. The weather is amazing compared to the Northeast. It’s pretty cheap to live here. There’s a lot of good breweries and restaurants. It’s fun to live in a growing city and being a part of that. I like watching buildings going up. Unbeknownst to me when I moved but the art museum that I live near is awesome, and so are all the greenways. We live near the beach and Asheville, and there’s a bunch of other cool cities like Durham, Winston, Greensboro, and Charlotte close by and accessible by train or car.

I don’t think this makes a brand, but it makes a damn fine place to spend your life.

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Brand or no brand, the Triangle (and North Carolina in general) is an amazing place to live, study, and work. Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with you on that -and if I had the muscles for it, I would literally fight anyone who says otherwise. There’s a reason why I’ve acted like I’ll move out of this area since I got out of high school -yet I’m still here now, neck deep in grad school.

In that context…

I think branding (whether it’s a city, a product, or literally anything else) matters because it gives you leverage. It gives you power. A weapon, a tool to ensure that your point sticks.

It’s not an “I’m insecure about this city and what it has to offer” thing or an “I want Raleigh to be sexier” kind of deal (though, yeah, Raleigh has things to improve on; why else would we all be on this site?). But a brand, when it’s at its full potential, serves a social purpose that goes beyond being a marketing ploy.

Rewind back to last year, and imagine you were in the team that tried to bring Apple to RTP. Yeah you could sell them on simply practical matters (job force! taxes! education! less traffic than Texas!), but that’s nothing more than a dry negotiation; it doesn’t ~compel~ you to do anything or make you feel passionate. If you accept that we’re humans and not emotion-independent robots, no matter how professional you are, you gotta admit emotions can sway decisions. I think it’s the same thing for anything else, whether it’s for recruiting students/speakers at a university, scouting for performers to Red Hat/Duke Energy, or even getting people to feel ownership and be excited about a new town investment. It sparks energy, promotes conversations, and fosters a shared, unified identity. It’s a thing.

It’s basically the same reason as to why you always need a good suit and tie/dress in your wardrobe: you may not wear it every single day, but in the times or places when first impressions matter, it could make or break your deal. The ability to have a solid brand (like in nice clothes) means infinitely more than whether you actually use it.

At the end of the day, it’s pretty much a fancier, complicated version of the “internal vs external motivation” debate -whether you think the only kind of “value” that matters is what you think of it, or you recognize that society is a system that’s beyond yourself (so external factors matter).

I just happen to like taking it one step further :stuck_out_tongue:

(…I’ve been writing lots of these long posts lately. Maybe I should start a blog or something lol)

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You make a lot of good points. I guess because I didn’t need any kind of branding to make me want to move here, I wasn’t thinking about all the situations where it makes a difference. Well done :slight_smile:

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The Top 10 List City. You could create a 30 second spot or 5 minute video highlighting the top 10 lists we’re honored to be on. And that potentially brings credibility as we’re just telling you what other people think, not trying to make something up. I mean, that’s how I brag about Raleigh besides the things already mentioned above.

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If there is a city with an identity - Its Nashville. And yes, there has been some bad music to come out of there but it’s wrong to say its all shitty. Some of the most talented people on the planet call Nashville home. Too many to list - you can do your own research.

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Part apple, part dead cat, part RnR drummer. Nyango Star is the answer.

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67

I’d be down for badass, fluffy musicians (playing bluegrass?) to represent Raleigh. But my side job experience in the Japanese entertainment industry says “helllll nooooo” to this.

The Japanese media landscape is very very different from America, and I think yuru-charas mainly succeeded as much as it did because of how centralized everything is over there. A small, consolidated, and isolated media market, frequent interactions between comedians, actors, musicians, and even politicians on prime-time TV, a vice grip on copyright protections by big media… even if a tenth of what Alex Jones say about American national media were true, it still doesn’t compare to how things are over there.

Even if you could come up with lovable, funny mainstays like Funassyi or Kumamon that could grab international attention, the laws of physics won’t act the same way for us. Do we have an idea that could really pull through?

(also see: John Oliver’s take on Japanese mascot characters, and how it doesn’t really translate to American culture)

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A person can dream. . .

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Oh, of course! I’m just saying there’s this super-important variable to keep in mind, but you wouldn’t know to care about it from this side of the planet.

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I’ve said it before somewhere on this site and I’ll say it again here: when I moved here, I was driving on I-40 in what seemed like the middle of the woods and all of a sudden, after I passed Saunders St., there it was on the left: a city in a forest.

We have:

  1. A fantastic greenway system,
  2. More big parks than you can shake a stick at (Dix, Pullen, Umstead, Lake Johnson, Falls Lake),
  3. a nationally-acclaimed art museum… also in a park,
  4. the dang City of Oaks moniker.

And if you don’t like it, you can drive to the beach in under two hours and the mountains in about three. We have the outdoor opportunities of Colorado at one-third the altitude and half the cost. Yes we have good beer, good restaurants, good startups, some bike lanes, some southern charm, but what we really have is NATURE. What other city looks like it popped up overnight from the middle of the woods? We have a very very small footprint of legacy industrial, so we can’t build our own SoHo or NoDa or Strip District but what we can drive home is that this city of 500,000 is more connected to nature than any other city of its size in the country. Feels like a small town and plays like a big city.

The City in the Woods. And failing that, Smithsonian of the South is still really cool.

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Atlanta calls itself the “City in the Forest”. I also personally like the Smithsonian of the South, but every time I say it to a nonRaleighite, I get a funny look.

But yes, I think our ties to nature and surrounding amenities (beach and mountains) is a big selling point for those relocating to the area.

Sorry, gotta pull out the geologist cap for min… Denver elevation is 5,280 feet (Mile High City), Raleigh elevation is 315 feet. :wink: Denver has blizzards, Raleigh has Hurricanes

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I was definitely taking some liberties in referring to our mountains to the west as part of “Greater Raleigh” or whatnot.

And maybe we can go with “The Greenway City” if Atlanta already has the Forest.

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City in the Woods = Sprawl. Not sure I can get behind that.

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What you call sprawl is actually what the vast majority of people living in Wake County likes the most about Raleigh and it’s surrounding communities…

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Great. Thanks for that. I have to think that the vast majority of people don’t realize how terrible that type of environment is - otherwise, I can’t explain it.

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Most people want a yard with trees and grass and just a little bit of space between neighbors and a nice safe yard for their kids to play in. I love working in dtraleigh but I would not want to live there. I feel like I have the best of two worlds. And I suspect most people feel the same way I do.

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There is a difference between living in a leafy suburb with a backyard and unmitigated/unplanned sprawl. There are plenty of well built suburbs that adhere to good design and urban planning principles - Cary is not that. Raleigh’s suburbs are a special kind of terrible.

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I think what most people say about how suburban, single-family homes are good is a cultural thing. It’s not like suburbs are the culmination of the American living condition -but, instead, it’s the result of trends and changes in the 20th century crossed with high-school-level psychology (people desire what they’re comfortable with). Many* Americans after the Great Depression and World War II were biased against both cramped cities and desolate countrysides, so they just made their own “Option 3”. @Phil this is not unique to the Triangle, but it’s an issue that’s been annoying planners across America for a pretty long time.

But the flip side of “Option 3” is that it advances what you want and what you are comfortable with now, very well… but only that.

Sprawl is, at its core, a fundamentally self-centered way to look at things. I’m not saying it’s immoral or anything like that, but if you have a worldview where you’re trying to satisfy your own sense of comfort/familiarity at this moment of time for your own wants, you’re not going to feel a ton of motivation to either think about other people (especially who don’t look like you or live in the same situation as you) or other points in time (a neighborhood that “always looks the same” will probably make you take that for granted and be even more freaked out if anything changes).

@TedF I think that’s what a lot of people on this forum -and pro-thoughtful planning people, in general- are objecting to. We do not live in a perfect system; instead, our world’s unjust inequality is getting baked into society generation by generation, our country is undergoing lots of industrial and demographic changes, and our planet’s climate is changing every rule in the book.

You as an individual may be fine, and that’s great and awesome. But I think a lot of people are not -enough to say that we (all of us) probably have a responsibility to take a step back about what we’ve been doing and assuming.

TL/DR: suburbs are fine and all for individuals, but what if sacrificing a little bit more is better for all of us, at large?

*: usually white families above a certain income level or financial class.

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More Oakwood and Mordecai, less Cary and Fuquay-Varina. Apparently, F-V has been experiencing Los Angeles levels of horrendous traffic during rush hour due to limited road capacity and terrible planning.

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Well that is what the vast majority of people want - so be it.