Am I the only one who questions this?
Of course it’s easy to spend money and duplicate effort when you hire the wife of the Congressman:
Coalition polls region to find brand – Dayton Business Journal: [1]
That’s the question the Dayton Development Coalition wants to address after deciding the region needs an identity of its own.The coalition is in the midst of a campaign to brand and market the Dayton region. The $1 million project now is in the research and information-gathering phase. Marketing materials will be unveiled in September followed by a rollout to the communities within the region, said Maureen Patterson, project manager.
Coalition leaders are working to raise $200,000 to leverage a matching grant from the Ohio Business Development Coalition that will go toward the project, said Edward Burghard, executive director of the OBDC….
A lot of the work is being done by expert volunteers, but the coalition has hired a few groups: the University of Dayton is helping with research, Turner Effect [2] is working on marketing, and Real Art Design Group is doing the creative marketing materials.
The coalition isn’t the only local entity working on a regional branding project. The city of Dayton in the next three weeks will choose a marketing company to brand the city, said City Spokesman Tom Biedenharn. The city’s request for proposals indicates it will work in conjunction with the coalition’s effort.
For the record: I own The Next Wave [3], an ad agency in Dayton. We decided not to bid on the Dayton proposal when we saw that the city wasn’t smart enough to know how to e-mail the rfp- and it had questionable past-performance requirements built in.