Rudman's city: Search for city's inner self hijacked by gobbledygook

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Roll up, roll up, the latest little sideshow at the Auckland City Council is about to start. Officials want to launch a hunt for Auckland City's "personality".

Like the old beauty quests of the past, it seems having bumps and curves in the right place - and this city of volcanoes has a super-sufficiency of those - is no longer enough. It's what goes on inside our city's pretty little head and curvaceous body that really counts.

To discover that, the wise men of this council's communications and marketing department want to create a model. By that I think they mean a computer programme and not a sexy Miss Auckland with brains.

The whole circus was sparked off earlier this year when new councillor Doug Armstrong called for a return to the old city slogan, Auckland, City of Sails.

To be honest, many of us had not, until then, realised it had even gone. The little logo of two sails on a shimmery sea with Rangitoto in the background was still about. And, as far as I recall, it is still on the side of council cars, and on the jumpers of parking wardens, as it had been since it was adopted back at the birth of the enlarged city in 1989.

But while the logo lived on, it seems the Fletcher council had replaced the words with the underwhelming catchcry First City of the Pacific. Absolutely Positively Wellington it was not. It was not even as catchy as City of Sails, and except in council puffery, First City etc sank without trace.

In February, after Mr Armstrong's suggestion, councillors were presented with various options by the marketing gurus. The bargain-basement proposal, costing just $10,000, was to sling a few City of Sails banners around the waterfront. The $3 million option was to rebrand every cup, sign and piece of stationery.

Because of all the other hijinks going on at the time, I rather lost track of the logo saga after that. But it does seem to have popped up at the March 6 meeting of the strategy and governance committee. There, councillors resolved "that branding guidelines be developed that create a unique Auckland City personality to be applied to all Auckland City communications regardless of the content subject."

As you can see, by then the simple exercise had been hijacked by the gobbledygook of the hired hands.

It always amazes me how experts, hired at great cost to share their wisdom in the fields of marketing and communications, are such poor practitioners of the craft.

Take the two-page report on "Auckland City brand personality" to today's meeting of the strategy and governance committee. It is written by the council's "brand and channel manager". I am intrigued by the channel manager bit. Does it mean he receives advice from the other side?

You certainly have to wonder when the explanatory data he provides councillors includes incomprehensible pyramid-chart examples of a fertiliser business and a manufacturing business.

The top of the pyramid of the latter example is labelled "Strategic Essence/IBC (internal behaviour cue) - revolutionising the everyday."

And you thought being a councillor was easy.

The guts of the report is that "to create a unique Auckland City personality ... there needs to be agreement on what Auckland City's personality should be".

To do that, the gurus are recommending a model be set up.

I must admit all this talk of creating a personality is a bit confusing. I thought the aim would have been to find the existing personality, not make one up.

But to continue. Once Auckland's inner self is found - or concocted - then comes the sell. The "communicating of the Auckland City personality". We are told "a low-cost option would enable co-ordination of the wardrobe through the development of tools and guidelines at a cost of $30,000, which would then be applied to all Auckland City communications".

Where the wardrobe came from I have no idea. Perhaps they are proposing Mayor John Banks and his councillors deck themselves out in toga-like sail cloth for official occasions. That's if City of Sails is to be our personality. Or grass skirts, if Pacific wins the day.

But hopefully, councillors will toss all this gobbledygook into the bin and just get on with it. If we have to have a slogan, City of Sails is well known and already in place.

We do not need modelling to tell us that.

As for representing our personality, well that's a taller order. But the sail slogan certainly reflects our unique geographic position between two - or if we wanted to toss in the Kaipara, three - great harbours.

It reflects the seafaring achievements of migrants from both the Pacific and further afield and of our modern-day yachties.

For a council that did not bother to call for models before deciding to sell public housing and airport shares, it should not be hard to decide today to cut through the silliness, declare we are still the City of Sails, and just get on with it.