Branding Paris

Get your thinking berets on, marketing students, we've got a demanding client on the line.

Trailing cantankerously behind her perennial competitors New York, Edinburg, and Venice, Madame la Ville de Lumière has made it known that she is now accepting PR courtiers with sexy pitches and brilliant projected visibility percentages to woo her with promises of an abiding positive reputation and eternal tourist consumption.

Bertrand Delanoë, ever the savvy image-conscious mayor of Paris, recently announced that he is seeking a PR consulting agency to "créer une marque et contrôler l'exploitation parfois abusive de sa notoriété par des tiers" or create a new brand for the city of Paris that the non-initiated can't coopt or (illegally) copy.

So how's 'bout it, team? A curvilinear allusion to the Eiffel Tower, some bleu, blanc, rouge, and perhaps an exposed breast or two, and we should at least make the short list!

Call me an urban PR luddite, but doesn't branding an already mythical city like Paris seem redundant and redolent of the 1980's? Does Paris' insignia really get trafficked so abusively that an urgent call for a new, inimitable version must be created ASAP? More importantly, from exactly which piggy bank are the funds to finance this little branding project being milked?

Call me public administration naive, but aren't there some maternity clinics that could use refurbishing? Or HLM projects that could use renovating?

What the mayor really needs is a mascot - and there's an ostrich farm in Saint-Eustache just hopping to oblige.

Image courtesy of Grafton Cottage