Calgary's Identity Crisis

There is a paradox at the heart of being a Calgarian: our understanding of our city is so very different from that of outsiders.

The rest of Canada tends to think of us as one part conservative cowboy, one part wealthy oil exec, with a smattering of red-necked lunatic. That’s partly true, but here are some less-obvious truths: we are more ethnically diverse than Montreal, way more of us listen to CBC Radio than Country 105 and we spend more on performing and visual arts than anyone else in Canada.

Which is all to say that we’re complex, just like every other city. In fact, you could argue that Calgary best represents Canada as a whole, since we are a place where the urban and the rural come together. We’re a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.

But, for some reason, we’re also frequently viewed as assholes, which is isolating, no matter how much we say we don’t care. It’s bad for the city, too. After years of in-migration, Calgary lost people between 2009 and 2010. Saskatchewan has been repatriating its population with ads that tug at the heartstrings and showcase lovely low unemployment rates and housing prices. Even Australia has been mowing our grass; at the end of 2011’s endless winter, the country made two forays into the city to poach oil and gas workers.

Calgary has not really ever tried to sell itself to the rest of the country or the rest of the world as a place to live and work. The one organization in the city that has been very successful in promoting Calgary is the Calgary Stampede. So the story of Calgary tends to be dominated by that one image: The Cowboy.

“We’ve had feedback from a lot of organizations,” says Mary Moran, director of marketing and communications at Calgary Economic Development (CED). “Particularly when recruiting out of the U.S., people are like: ‘What? Calgary?’ They don’t know where it is, their awareness is low or what they do know about it is fairly thin. They may know things about Stampede, but they don’t know the broader story.”

But Calgary is trying to change the narrative, as they say in politics. The idea is if we can tell our story better, the city will attract skilled workers who will come here, marry, buy a house, have children and not necessarily leave town when the boom times wane. To be more precise: the city is trying to ditch the cowboy image. Again.

CED has launched a new initiative with the stated goal of attracting more skilled workers to Calgary and the unstated goal of road-testing a new slogan for the city — “Calgary: Be Part of the Energy.” It represents our dominant industry and highlights the undeniable energy or vibrancy of our city.

What’s interesting, and a little surprising, is many of the obstacles that previously stood in the way of separating Calgary and Cowboy have fallen. There’s very little opposition to this new plan. Before pulling the new campaign together, CED went out and asked people in and out of the city what their perceptions were of Calgary. “People both here and abroad came up with a couple of emerging themes,” says Moran. “One was that the election of Mayor [Naheed] Nenshi has changed the perception of Calgary. People said that [they] no longer think of [Calgary] as redneck. The interesting part about the election is that the rest of the county and the rest of the world was very surprised by the results, but Calgarians weren’t that surprised that we elected a Muslim mayor who was so dynamic and energetic and educated.”

Anyone who follows municipal politics might be getting bored of the rebranding talk, given that this is the third effort in a decade. Back in the early 2000s, our current brand, “Heart of the New West,” was created. Rumour has it, the original artwork had no cowboy imagery, but the Calgary Stampede stepped in and asked that the iconic white hat be added.

A half dozen years later, another attempt was made that was much more public and controversial. Heart of the New West had never caught on with the business or tourism community. Only CED and Tourism Calgary used the branding in any meaningful way, so a new effort was struck up in 2007, led by Lance Carlson, who was then the head of the Alberta College of Art + Design.

Carlson was a transplanted Los Angeleno and had thought long and hard not just about branding in general, but branding in Alberta. However, he was not down with the cowboys, saying it only addressed a slice of Calgary’s culture.

The problems began when an L.A.-based consulting firm, Gensler, was hired to do the branding, beating out local firms. The contract was for around $200,000 and involved two years of research, a positioning statement and two brand choices. The only portion made public was the positioning statement “Calgary: Canada’s Most Dynamic City,” which was kind of lame — equal parts obvious and meaningless. A pinch of controversy was added when Carlson finished up his contract at ACAD, moved back to Los Angeles and took a job at Gensler.

Oh, the dust up that five word positioning statement caused! The money spent, the local firms passed over, the shunning of our western heritage. George Brookman, chair of Tourism Calgary and former chair of the Stampede, was quoted in the Calgary Herald saying he was very upset about it, that it was a make-work project he hoped would die a slow death and there was nothing wrong with “Heart of the New West.”

“I heard that there was a real bias against the cowboy theme going into the last brand refresh,” says Joe Hospodarec, executive creative director at the WAX partnership, a local advertising firm that bid on the contract Gensler won. “Someone on the committee really hated the cowboy image and wanted to move away from it.”

Hospodarec is still a little annoyed CED didn’t choose a local firm for that branding exercise, but he does say the cowboy theme is limiting. “When I lived in Toronto, all the images we saw about Calgary were built on the cowboy theme,” he says. “We didn’t put out any other message. We’re trying to build a modern city with cultural attractions and lots of innovation, I think it’s better that they dropped it.”

This time round, CED is treading carefully. With Nenshi’s support, last spring, CED began to approach Calgary companies, big and small (including RedPoint Media, Avenue’s parent company), pitching the “Be Part of the Energy” initiative. Instead of starting with a logo and slogan and hoping businesses adopt it, the idea was to develop the brand from the bottom up — with buy-in from the outset. For a minimum of $25,000, any company that signed on gets the use of the campaign brand; an opportunity to go to the events CED will hold in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax; and a voice in the rollout of the campaign.

The pick-up was impressive. CED reached its initial goal of raising $1.1 million dollars in a little less than two months. It may seem an intangible benefit for a lot of money, but the initiative was successful in raising the money largely because the idea of telling Calgary’s story better resonated with the corporate partners. Another reason the campaign was so successful in signing up partners is the brand is broad enough to satisfy Calgary’s dual nature: the urban sophisticate and the cowboy, without emphasizing either.

What’s key about the campaign is it doesn’t attempt to tell the entire story with just a five-word slogan. The advertising and airport billboards and events outside Calgary will all direct interested people to a website — bepartoftheenergy.com — that tells Calgary’s story in full sentences, to borrow a phrase from Nenshi. There are video testimonials from Calgarians about what it’s like to live and work in the city and links to all the corporate partners.

“It’s a really good, strong Calgary story,” says Moran.

Moran, understandably, is cautious in speaking about the potential for “Be Part of the Energy” to become Calgary’s new overall brand — it is not, at the moment, being pitched as a replacement for “Heart of the New West,” only a complement.

“The campaign brand was designed to meet business objectives. It was not designed to be a place brand,” she says. “But that all said, we used a lot of the research that was done during the place branding because it just made sense. If it organically turns into a place brand, then that is great, but we’ll let it evolve.”

Still, some of the corporate partners are eager to bring the campaign brand to the city as a whole. “I would love it,” says Danielle Durand, director of sales with the Hyatt Regency and one of the voices on bepartoftheenergy.com. “There is a great energy about this city, and it’s good to have a message that can mean a lot of things. It’s not so narrow and it can still speak to the cowboy or pioneering energy.

“I’ve been part of the tourism industry a long time, and there are lots of people out there talking about Calgary with different messages. It’s time that we had some consensus.”

Representing the other side of the debate is Jeff Lowe, vice president of marketing with Telus. He was part of the discussion in building the campaign and said his company also signed on, in part, to help with the city’s image. However, despite his support for “Be Part of the Energy,” Lowe likes the cowboy mystique.

“For me it’s more of a benefit than a drawback; what’s inherent in that analogy is a sense that a handshake is good for your word and there’s a sense of open, honest welcome-ness,” he says. “We talked about that: is it a good thing or a bad thing? From my perspective, I’d like to see that continue, it doesn’t mean that can’t be under the umbrella of ‘Be Part of the Energy.’ The energy part is there, the oil and gas part is there, but the cowboy part is not.”

Lowe thinks our Western heritage should be used as the underpinning to any branding effort. The problem is, as the city grows and there are more people here who haven’t been weaned on Stampede mini-doughnuts, there will probably never be consensus on the cowboy question; there are simply too many people who have a knee-jerk negative reaction to the cowboy brand.

While people like Lowe point to the wholesome Western values associated with the cowboy image — namely hard-working, honest people who seal a deal with a handshake — it’s hard to get away from the negative aspects of the stereotype: homophobic, conservative, redneck, dead horses at the Stampede.

It took Hospodarec time and a stint away from the city to appreciate the cowboy culture. “I struggled with the cowboy thing when I was younger; I hated the Stampede,” he says. “Then I moved away for a number of years and, when I came back, I loved it. The city feels unified for 10 days, it’s really exuberant, there’s tonnes of energy. It’s a real difference that we have.”

Having said that, Hospodarec thinks “Be Part of the Energy” works as a city brand. “I work with lots of Calgary companies, either with their outward-facing brands or their inward-facing strategic plans, and many of them use the premise of energy in their messages,” he says. “We are a very energetic city. We work really hard. The logo makes us seem friendly. It’s a nice invitation to work, live, invest here. I don’t have a single criticism. Calgary Economic Development might be surprised to hear that.”

Moran is hoping the branding is vague enough to draw everyone in. “Our campaign is very generic,” she says. “‘I Love New York’ means a lot of things to a lot of people, and we took that approach.” Through the pitching process the response was overwhelmingly positive, says Moran. “I think that because the brand is generic enough, people get it,” she says. “At the same time, there are few icons that you can hang your hat on.”

Which is to say Moran wants to hang Calgary’s hat on the idea of energy, instead of on an actual cowboy hat. “Energy is something we can own; this city has a strong sector, a strong vibrancy about it, whether it be youthful, or a can-do attitude, or our western heritage and hospitality.”

And what does Brookman think? The quintessential Calgary booster, chief executive of West Canadian Graphics, former chair of the Stampede and the guy who helped fund the giant bronze bucking bull statue outside of the Stock Exchange Tower. He’s good with it. “I think it’s great. I think that it’s a slogan that fits everything, a bucking bronco or the energy in the city, so, no, I don’t think it detracts from our Western image,” he says,

Speaking of hats, Brookman remains attached to one key aspect of the city’s western identity, the white hat: “I went to China [with the CED last spring] and we took 500 white hats. People were clamouring for them, they love the white hats. So, as long as we continue to use that white hat as an identifier, I’m absolutely fine.