Alabama is for lovers

Place branding, like conventional branding, has its ridiculous moments. Such as the billboard in suburban Atlanta proclaiming "Alabama is for lovers." You don't have to be a yankee to find something a little odd in that statment. When I think of Alabama, I think of racism, the Civil Rights Movement, amazingly unintelligible Southern redneck accents, and so on. I certainly don't think to myself, "Where should I go on my honeymoon? I know!..." In the same way, I certainly don't associate Denmark with "cosiness, straightforward, design, bright, and oasis," (nor do I assume that all Danes make a habit of mixing nouns and adjectives in lists). Even if I did associate Denmark with all those things/descriptors, it wouldn't necessarily make me want to spend the couple thousand or so dollars it would cost to spend a week there as opposed to neutral, mountains, multi-lingual, bankers Switzerland.

Let's ponder crowded, one-child, red, Three Gorges, not-so-communist-anymore China for a second. Beijing will have the Olympics very soon. For the past couple of years the Beijing government has been enforcing a politeness campaign under the auspices of Beijing's Capital Ethics Development Office with the sole purpose of making Chinese citizens more Westernly polite in an attempt to impress all the visitors for the Games. In waging this $2.5 million campaign, the Chinese government is trying to do exactly what Blichfeldt claimed was impossible: to manage place brands by altering the behavior of the inhabitants of that place. While the success of the campaign was/is mixed at best, the very attempt to control people's lives to such an extent is interesting. (Not only did the government want people to alter their public lives - stop crowding busses, spitting, cursing, etc. - but also to tweak their private lives - no burping/farting/chewing-with-your-mouth-open at the table. As a nominally communist state, China can get away with such things, but elsewhere, Blichfeldt was correct in saying "locals are beyond the direct control of marketers" (Blichfeldt 398).

However, to me, the very necessity of (and the author's assumptions and implications inherent in) that statement are frightening. OF COURSE the locals are (should be) beyond the direct (or any) control of marketers. If they were, then the whole world would be DisneyLand, and we would all cease to be people; we would become characters in fuzzy suits, all living for the sole purpose of entertaining our "guests," never escaping that demeaning role until we ourself become "guests," willingly turning from slave to slave-master.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-02-08-china-manners_x.htm