City unveils fruits of branding effort

By Caroline Boyer

How do you describe a place that is full of history but growing, with people who are honest, hard-working and genuine?

Shawnee may have found the best way to convey that in the phrase “Good Starts Here.”

In the coming months, Shawnee will unveil its new brand, symbolized by this phrase, designed to capture all of the city’s best and most unique attributes — everything that sets it apart from and above its neighbors in Johnson County and the Kansas City metropolitan area.

The city’s new “brand” is accompanied by a new logo, a tree to symbolize the city’s deep-rooted heritage with its branches growing and stretching toward the future. Elements of the brand will be rolled out slowly in the coming months, with a new flag already on display at City Hall and a link to goodstartshere.org on the city’s Web site. The brand, and all the information gathered during its creation, will be used by all city-related organizations, including the Shawnee Chamber of Commerce, the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, and the Economic Development Council.

Since finalizing the brand just two weeks ago, some of the information has already been used, said Carol Gonzales, city manager.

“There have been at least two specific times that I can think of that we’ve forwarded it to developers, people looking at Shawnee,” she said. “So it’s great, great data for us.”

Shawnee officials decided to make moves toward creating a brand after a “leadership summit” in the fall of 2006. It was decided the city needed to do something more to stand out from its neighbors.

“To me the biggest, coolest thing about the whole thing is that everybody came together and identified this as something we wanted to work on,” Gonzales said. “I don’t know that many communities work together like that.”

Gonzales pointed to a one of her favorite quotes describing Shawnee gathered during the branding process as indicative of Shawnee’s place among local cities: “Shawnee is humble in the face of praise.”

“We’re just good people and people are working hard and don’t think about selling ourselves, and in this competitive environment, we’ve got to,” she said. “And this is a real genuine way of coming together and providing a way now of marketing ourselves. We have to be creative and use it, and use it in some cool ways.”

The city hired North Star Destination Strategies to help create a brand in late 2007, and the firm quickly began researching the community, conducting surveys with Shawnee residents as well as others in the metro area to define the city’s identity.

After a year, North Star found that adjectives people most often used to describe Shawnee were friendly, historic, homey and clean. Describing the character of people in Shawnee brought out phrases like hard-working and down-to-earth.

Asked who Shawnee would be if it were a famous person, some popular responses were John Wayne, with high values and an overall sense of fairness; Benjamin Franklin, healthy, wealthy, wise, progressive and frugal; and Henry Fonda, someone who relates to everyone and is comfortable in his own shoes.

Those asked to describe Shawnee to someone who has never heard of it came up with answers that included: “It’s a city that gets together and gets things done together.”

North Star also created a community profile for Shawnee, putting residents into 12 “life mode” groups based on lifestyle and life stage, taking into account occupation, income, living arrangements, lifestyle and media patterns. Most residents — 54 percent — were classified in the “High Society” group, made up of affluent and educated family households.

Residents also were classified as “Upscale Avenues” (13 percent), those with prosperity and success earned from years of hard work; “Solo Acts” (12 percent), educated, working professional singles who enjoy city life; and “High Hopes” (8 percent), those seeking the American dream of home ownership and a rewarding job.

Survey responses all indicated Shawnee’s parks and trails were among its best attributes, and that Shawnee Town was widely known and identified with the city.

So the goal or the brand was to communicate that Shawnee was for people who appreciate genuine quality, where a heritage of nourishing new beginnings continues today, so that every day offers a fresh opportunity. The brand supports Shawnee’s image as the best affordable suburb of Kansas City, as BusinessWeek named it in 2006.

The goal of using the new brand also is to overcome a lack of awareness that Shawnee is a vibrant, growing community with a trailblazing heritage, not a small, aging community.

Gonzales said the city was working on the graphics of the new brand and would slowly incorporate it into all city documents, even putting it on city vehicles. However, that doesn’t mean the city seal, featuring a covered wagon, will go away; it still will be used on official city documents.

But the new brand will be everywhere else, bringing a uniformity to every organization within the city.

“The biggest power of it is that we begin to develop this image for Shawnee, and no matter where you go, whether you go to the chamber (Web) page or the city page, you know you’re in Shawnee,” Gonzales said. “We all have the same message and the same professional look and feel. We’re sharing the same cohesive message about who Shawnee is, what makes it unique and special.”