Branded city

City, as a brand! Am I hearing that right? This will be reaction of many of us, have we ever thought of our city as a brand? ofcourse we did, though we did we never realise that we did. Confusing? OK, let me make things clear for you. I hail from a city that made its mark quite recently, 'Bangalore' now that name has been in the news for quite some time. People say "my job got bangalored" For those who did not understand. It means they lost their job to a Bangalorean. That makes me feel proud of bangalore. For me its a great thing about bangalore, but for the one who lost his job, its a bad bad thing. My perception of the name bangalore in positive, but in the latters case it is negetive. Are we really talking about any tangibe part of bangalore. No we are not, we are talking about brand bangalore.
Lets first understand, what a brand is? Brand is an amorphous entity. Infact any proper noun can be a brand. It's a thought. A thought that lives in peoples mind.To understand what a branded city is, lets first understand what a city's brand image is.A city's brand image is, the collective set of thoughts that a city enjoys in the mind of people.These minds include those of people who live in the city and equaly the minds of people who do not live in it.The brand image of a city has therefore an intrinsic aspect, which is the image within the city, and an extrinsic aspect aspect which is the image outside the city. It is created by a whole set of disparate elements altogether. It is about the weather, culture, politics, society, people, religion, language, altitude, tolerance and a whole set of other factors.To that extent, the brand image of a city is really not a engineered one.It is an accident!. A literal small part of the chaos theory that abounds in much of our life altogether.
In a technical manner of speaking, brand engineering is a new science, art and philosophy on its own.Creating a brand image of a city is not about creating it from scratch on a drawing board. Instead it is about, using its positives, history and heritage to its advantage as one builds on the basic foundations that abound.