DEPARTMENT: Economic Development
DEPARTMENT HEAD: Rene Dominguez
COUNCIL DISTRICTS IMPACTED: City-Wide
SUBJECT:
Briefing by the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation (SAEDF)
SUMMARY:
The SAEDF will provide a briefing on the San Antonio branding initiative that aims to cohesively unify San Antonio’s various marketing messages around a set of brand characteristics bringing consistency and amplification to our city’s unique value proposition.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
For many years, well-intentioned organizations in San Antonio have been marketing the City through their own unique efforts. However, an opportunity exists to develop and coordinate a unifying brand for San Antonio. While there have been different efforts over the past several years attempting to address the challenge, in March of 2016, Mayor Taylor requested that SAEDF Chairman Wayne Peacock lead an enhanced effort to help unify San Antonio’s marketing platforms to properly portray the city’s transformative growth, limitless opportunities and global aspirations.
This “movement” is designed to develop a set of community-approved and verified brand characteristics bringing consistency to San Antonio’s unique value proposition and amplifying community-wide efforts to market our city to various out-of-market targets. SAEDF engaged various community partners and stakeholders that actively market San Antonio to outside targets as a location to live, work, visit or operate a business.
The initial taskforce included:
• 80/20 Foundation
• Bexar County
• BioMed SA
• Brooks City Base
• Centro San Antonio
• Choose SA
• City of San Antonio Economic Development
• CPS Energy
• Geekdom
• Hemisfair
• HOLT CAT/Spurs
• North San Antonio Chamber of Commerce
• Port San Antonio
• San Antonio Manufacturing Association
• San Antonio Chamber of Commerce
• Visit San Antonio (formerly San Antonio Convention & Visitors Bureau)
• San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
• The Pearl
• Tricentennial
• TechBloc
• USAA
The stakeholder group discussed past efforts, contemplated lessons learned and ultimately agreed to begin by developing an understanding of the current consumer perceptions of San Antonio. In addition, to help provide focus to the effort, the taskforce chose to prioritize young professionals (Millennials aged between 22-34) as an initial target market.
To help coordinate the effort, a smaller workgroup was formed with a subset of representatives. They were charged with compiling and reviewing previous research and data to help build a structured record of key facts and feelings that define the San Antonio brand.
Along with defining a foundational platform for consistent communications, the workgroup established and defined San Antonio’s brand promise -- there are limitless opportunities in San Antonio. Our key benefits showed that San Antonio is a community where you can make your mark because only our city combines the vibrancy and opportunities of a big city with the charm, warmth and authenticity of a small town.
After reviewing the available research, the workgroup developed a concise list of descriptive words and corresponding imagery that captures San Antonio’s brand essence that would appeal to the target demographic. SAEDF will share this preliminary work product and related imagery during the presentation.
The SAEDF is currently working to engage a third-party to support the remaining steps of this comprehensive process. This includes developing and implementing a validation plan for testing, refining the concepts and formalizing the proposed brand essence creative concepts.
Additionally, Phase II of the effort includes creating an open source “toolkit” for all stakeholders to access who will be implementing branding initiatives in their respective organizations. The toolkit will serve as a resource for area organizations to pool information, visuals, messaging, calendars and other helpful materials to facilitate opportunities for collaboration and more synergized messaging for San Antonio.
ALTERNATIVES:
This is a briefing item only.
FISCAL IMPACT:
This is a briefing item only.
RECOMMENDATION:
This item is a staff briefing and requires no action.