Can you salvage an unpopular brand (or "Maybe Bradford should Change its name?")

Polling company YouGov recently looked at how "well-liked" UK cities were, with the findings placing Bradford at the bottom on 23% and York at the top on 92%. Obviously, when local politicians in Bradford as asked their view the response is to attack the poll - "really annoying", "people haven't visited", "misleading" - rather than ask why it is that people have such a poor opinion of Bradford's brand. Nor does it help to say "Bradford is wonderful", babble on about "diversity" or list a load of attractions. We must shout louder is another favourite line, as if mere communications volume is sufficient to turn the UK's worst city brand into a winner.

All this raises an important question - can we turn round a really unpopular or damaged brand? There are always suggestions out there including:

Listen to what consumers are saying

Engage with what they say even if it hurts

Seek out the most negative and talk with them

Shooting the messenger - what my colleagues are doing by attacking YouGov's poll - merely reinforces the problem. We also seek out only those people who have positive things to say, surrounding ourselves with a protective bubble of that positivity. It feels good but gets nowhere near the job at hand of fixing the brand's problems. And, let's remember too, that brands are defined by the interaction between the consumer and the identity not just by the spin we create around that identity.

A more constructive response to YouGov's work would have been to go talk to them about the polling, perhaps even commission them to dig a little deeper into why people don't like Bradford (or taking on board that most won't have been here, don't like the idea of Bradford). Anecdotally, we all know that many residents in large parts of what makes up the Bradford district would really rather they weren't lumped in with that city. This is, after all, why we don't describe ourselves as a "city", choosing instead the less grand word "district" - the only UK city hiding its light under a bushel in this way. Most of us have witnessed (or even done it ourselves) people going through convoluted locational descriptions - "near Leeds", "Aire Valley", "just off the M62" and so forth - to avoid using the "B" word. I've a tendency to say "the next village to Haworth" as a short description of Cullingworth's place in the world.

What happens right now is a focus on what us marketers would call features, a sort of "hey look at all these things we've got, how can you not love us!" The problem is that - as the poll showed - people don't love us even though we've got City Park, The Alhambra, Science and Media Museum, and St George's Hall. Nor does the prospect of the Rugby League Museum, the refurbished Odeon and a new market add anything to this love. People's perception of a place are not a function of its features but reflect the interaction between those features (and others like idiot young men driving too fast) and the consumer.

I wrote recently, drawing on the work of American urbanist, Aaron Renn, about how Bradford needed an unique selling point suggesting that, for the old City, this USP is the Asian community - instead to trying to ape other cities through shiny regeneration projects (that mostly don't work) maybe we should set out our stall as the capital of Asian Britain. But to do this we would need to deal with the problem that half the district will hate this idea - they'd either have to lump it or else we'd need to find a parallel positioning that reflected these (in the main more successful) parts of the City.

The thing that connects Haworth, Queensbury, Bingley, Ilkley and villages like Cullingworth isn't that we're all in the Bradford "district" but that we're all in the South Pennines - Yorkshire's South Pennines. No-one owns that positioning and it allows us, instead of pretending that calling Haworth, Ilkley and Bingley 'Bradford' is any kind of help, to create an uniqueness for these places and it doesn't matter really if some of this leaks over into Calderdale or Skipton.

We have in 'Bradford' a broken brand that we've then dumped on a load of places that have so much to offer - Haworth, Ilkley, Saltaire - resulting in them losing impact because of the association with a city brand that is not liked. Given the realities - for all the "look at all the things we've got" rhetoric - it seems likely that association with Bradford will act only to harm those strong South Pennine brands. The options are to have two brands - "Bradford: Capital of Asian Britain" and "Yorkshire's South Pennines", to split the district into the City and the District, Bradford and South Pennine Yorkshire, or to focus on the positive and drop the name Bradford.

South Pennines* Metropolitan District Council anyone?

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*Update: For those who think the South Pennines are in Derbyshire, here's a link to a funky map from Chris Sands. 

*And OS 021 South Pennines

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