Arizona has a new logo, a part of a new branding campaign unveiled by the Arizona Office of Tourism late last month. It features a turquoise ARIZONA, with the Z fading into a jagged mountain scape that’s topped by a copper-colored “O” shaped like the sun, but made up of Arizona-themed icons.
The firm hired to create the new campaign worked with an Indigenous artist to do it, creating what tourism officials said would communicate all that Arizona has to offer. The campaign was paid for with $700,000 worth of pandemic relief money, according to The Arizona Republic, and took years and 2,000 people at listening sessions across the state.
But, what does it mean to brand a state? And who is something like this aimed at, anyway? John Pierce, Arizona State University marketing professor, has worked on campaigns like this before and joined The Show to talk about why they often begin.
Full conversation
JOHN PIERCE: Usually there's a a new administration, you have a new person in charge of tourism or business development. And usually there's some new set of truths about the state, you know, changing dynamics that the, the folks involved feel like it's a priority to kind of reframe how they want other people, namely tourists or business travelers to think about, you know, their state or city.
GILGER: So, I mean, what's the goal here when you're talking about branding something that's not a product, right? Like it's a place. How do you approach that differently than you might, you know, say like a piece of clothing or a makeup line or something like that?
PIERCE: Yeah, I mean, brands are created from products, services and ideas. And if you think about it, Arizona is an idea that the state would like for people who were thinking about visiting, either for leisure travel or for business travel, that when they, when they think about the state of Arizona, we through this, this representation of the brand mark or through a piece of creative that, whatever they see or hear, conjures up an image that the consumer can connect with. So it's the idea that, that a brand exists to create in the consumer's mind, an image, positive or negative of what that idea is all about.
GILGER: Yeah, that makes sense. So, what do you make of this vibrant Arizona campaign? It's a new logo, more will be coming, it sounds like next year. Does this kind of do, in your opinion, what tourism officials here say it's going to do and, and brand us as something more than golf courses and resorts for everybody out there?
PIERCE: I think they did a terrific job with it. To be honest, I think, this is no easy work. I worked on the city of Colorado Springs, on the task force that developed the logo for that city, and before we even got started, we had 15 deliverables, you know, things that had to be in the logo and that was just for a city that's a quarter of the size of, of Phoenix, let alone the whole state.
So I, I imagine when they sat down, they had a lot of things they felt like they needed to, to deliver on and yet at the same time, create a mark, a brand mark that, you know, communicated what the idea of Arizona is about.
GILGER: What idea do you think this delivers? I guess, like they did bring in an indigenous artist to work with them on this, with the firm did, which is an interesting approach and there is a lot of sort of cultural elements integrated here. How does this come across to you? What's the message?
PIERCE: I think that the message is that, you know, there's something for everybody here. If you look at the, the mandala that they used, which is the design effect to show different symbols. You know, they've included things that represent the northern part of the state, they've included things that represent the southern part of the state, our industry, our people, our terrain, all in a way that creates this idea that you're going to find here what you're looking for versus telling people what they should be finding here.
John Pierce
GILGER: Who does this kind of branding appeal to? Who is it trying to appeal to, like when a place is branding itself in this way, a state or a city or something like that, are we looking outward? Are we looking to tourists, people who want to come here? Some campaigns are very explicitly like that. Or is this more about giving Arizonans an identity?
PIERCE: I don't know this for certain, but I would think that 90 percent of the audience for this brand mark and the associated kind of creative that goes around it, would be leisure travelers from other states in the US, other countries around the world and for business travelers and people who book business conventions, because that's where you're gonna, that's where people are going to see this. I don't envision them using this brand mark in and around Arizona all that much, so you probably only see it if you were looking for places to visit, for personal vacation or for business travel.
In addition, I think 10 percent of it is probably kind of red meat for Arizonans to feel good about themselves. But, I think the heavy lifting on this is going to be attracting business and leisure travelers.
GILGER: Right, and I know of campaigns that came to mind when I was thinking about this, like that I have seen for other places a lot around Phoenix and around Arizona, right? Like, there's a campaign for Albuquerque that was up on a lot of billboards recently, you know, those commercials for California that are full of celebrities, right? There's some that really stand out. What do you think are some good ones? What do they do well?
PIERCE: Well, I think that California frankly, I know they're a rival state but I think they do a really good job. They had a campaign previously called ‘Dream Big’, which was also kind of, you know, getting at this idea that, you know, if you're a business traveler, you, you know, you can have big business ideas here and if you're a leisure traveler, you can do the same, and then they just switched to a tagline called Ultimate Playground’, which I think is probably more geared toward leisure travel. But, I think they do a really good job with a, with a, I think an equally difficult job, expressing the California as an idea, versus California as a geography.
GILGER: People often have like, preconceived notions about a place, right? Like there are a lot of stereotypes out there about Arizona. I mean, this, this new logo really, you know, uses the sun, but I mean, extreme heat is definitely one of them that's probably difficult for us right now. California, same thing, like people already kind of know what they think about that place or whether or not they'd want to go there. Do these kind of campaigns change minds?
PIERCE: I think a campaign like this and the, the brand mark that they've created around it, has the opportunity to change people's perspective and invite them to investigate a little more. Because, keeping in mind, this is a brand mark in the campaign, it doesn't change the reality, you know, on the ground, right? So the idea is, that I see this, I'm thinking about Arizona, I'm like, oh, I didn't really think about like, people are surprised there's mountains in Arizona. You know, and they've carefully included that in the, in the brain mark design. People don't think there's fishing here, and there is.
So, I think it may invite someone who's otherwise not interested to, to dig a little deeper. It doesn't solve, you know, the, the opportunity outright, but I think it invites people to dig a little deeper.
GILGER: Yeah. So I wonder, as you work on a campaign like this, right? Like, this is using public dollars, like there's got to be a measurement of success that comes with campaigns like these. Like, can you tell, can you link like a new branding campaign with tourism dollars that come in because of it?
PIERCE: I would think that they're going to be able to look year over year, in two or three years, to say the way we communicate about Arizona is working or it's not working and the brand mark would be part of that. I think about like, the Nike brand mark when they created it, you know, in 1971, they had no idea that that that mark would still be used in 2024. In fact, Phil Knight, the founder famously said, “I don't love it, but maybe it will grow on me”.
GILGER: All right, well, we'll leave it there, on that good note. That is John Pierce, a marketing professor at ASU, joining us to talk about Arizona's new campaign branding here, John, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for breaking this down with us, I appreciate it.
PIERCE: Thank you.
