Marketing firm hired to roll out ‘Columbus, Georgia: We do amazing’ brand

The process to move forward with the new city logo and slogan — “Columbus, Georgia: We do amazing” — advanced a step Wednesday as a local marketing company has begun working to promote the brand.

Columbus-based Image by Design has been hired and will be responsible for a public relations and marketing campaign using the logo and slogan created by Tennessee-based ChandlerThinks, said President and CEO of the Columbus GA Convention & Visitors Bureau Peter Bowden.

Bowden and representatives from the Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce met with Image By Design President Cyde McQuien on Wednesday to discuss how to move forward with a campaign to tell the city’s story.

The logo and slogan were rolled out by Bowden last week at Columbus Council’s work session. ChandlerThinks was paid $97,000 by the Convention & Visitors Bureau and the Chamber of Commerce for work to create the new brand as part of Columbus 2025, a chamber-backed initiative to create a more competitive and prosperous region. Terms of the deal with Image By Design are still being finalized, Bowden said.

“We are bringing it back into the community to lift the brand up and make it successful,” Bowden said of selecting a local company to market the rebranding.

The brand has come under social media fire since it was reported last week. The logo and slogan were posted on reddit.com, a news aggregation site, earlier this week and drew nearly 1,500 comments and more than 30,000 interactions. Most of the comments were not positive.

“I expected it,” Bowden of the negativity surrounding the new logo and slogan.

Steve Chandler (owner ChandlerThinks) confirmed that this is not unusual. With social media, it is just a little more in our face.

Image By Design will work with the existing logo and slogan, but the focus will be telling the city’s story using social media and other platforms, McQuien said. The budget for the campaign, which is a work in progress, has not been determined, McQuien said.

“We were not part of the development of the logo or brand, but we have been given the opportunity to help push the brand out,” McQuien said. “And the brand is much larger than a symbol or slogan.”

McQuien said he was not bothered by the fact that the brand was developed by a Tennessee company, pointing out that Image By Design works in communities outside of Columbus, specifically naming the Floyd Medical Center in Rome, Ga.

“In that case, we are the out-of-town guys,” McQuien said.

Locally, Image By Design created the marketing slogan used by the Columbus Police Department in its recruiting efforts, “Join the Force for Good.”

The message, Columbus is amazing, is a good one, McQuien said.

“Columbus is amazing,” he said. “That is a good message. I would stand and fight for that statement and defend it.”

This story was originally published November 8, 2017 at 5:48 PM with the headline "Marketing firm hired to roll out ‘Columbus, Georgia: We do amazing’ brand."