Reputation management is something the town council of Bialystok would do well to invest in as soon as possible to alleviate the mess they currently find themselves in, now rapidly gaining fame as the ‘gay Polish city’.

It could be seen as a silly mistake. The new logo of Białystok bears an obvious similarity to the logo of a gay institution in New York.

So what? They’re miles apart. Nothing else links them. Why should it matter?

However, in today’s digital world, it does matter.

The similarity was noticed by a websurfer who wrote about it on his blog.

In the ‘downtime’ between Christmas and New Year the story was picked up by other bloggers and in no time it is threatening the reputation of a perfectly respectable Polish city. If you type ‘Bialystok logo’ into Polish Google, all the first page stories are about the gay mix-up. The Roman Catholic Church is very strong in Poland – they will not be amused.

This is a classic example of how ‘branding’ can go horribly wrong when it’s not done properly. In a digital world, the rules are changing and the stakes are high – Bialystok is spending 2.7m Polish zloty (£675,000) on a rebranding campaign, and the current result is their fast-growing position as ‘the homosexual city’.

Rebranding: How did it all go wrong?

The officials of Bialystok employed a Krakow firm to rebrand their city. The image they decided to project was Bialystok as ‘the rising city’ and the logo they came up with was a representation (however vague) of the sun.

Unfortunately, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York have a very similar logo – which they have been using for at least two years.

On the evening of Friday 26^th December the first blog appeared in Poland under the heading ‘Bialystok’s homosexual logo’. Today locals are turning up at the Town Hall to give back bags, mugs and various other items bearing the new logo. They’re disgusted that Bialy-stok is becoming a laughing-stock.

Reputation management

What the story shows is how branding is moving beyond the control of the old-style branders and into the hands of any internet user.

This is the power that brings George Bush onto the first page of Google if you type in the keywords ‘miserable failure’ – and which, until Google had to be asked to remove it, used to bring up Tony Blair if you typed in ‘liar’. It won’t be long before the results of googling ‘Bialystok’ will all be to do with homosexuality.

Nowadays it is not enough to ‘have a brand’. The key issue is reputation management – and managing your reputation online, when every amateur blog can affect your rating, has become a new specialism.

 

Ebranding – what every decision-maker needs to know

Just to clarify a few terms.

Ebranding is about making your brand visible, meaningful and recognisable across all digital media (online, mobile phones, TV, radio, etc) as well as traditional media (print – newspapers, ads, etc).

Your brand is the impression that other people have of you. For example, in the public perception currently Bialystok = homosexuality.

Reputation management is a specialised field which involves counter-blogging to defuse Google bombs, influencing current (negative) bloggers to move them onto different discussions, link-building, and SEO’d copywriting which can counteract the negate online image and re-establish the positive image you want to project.

‘We help address these potential public relations disasters for our clients’, said Rory De Niro, MD of London-based digital marketing company PROPERO Digital, www.properodigital.com. ‘Things happen in business but, naturally, companies don’t wish to dwell on the negatives.  They need to demonstrate to their customers that they are addressing any issues and making their organisation better.  Earlier this year, for example, we were called in to handle negative publicity which reflected badly on a top UK financial institution.  Within hours, the story went from the top of the first page to page three on Google, allowing the correct, solid perception of the company to be at the forefront of the search results for their brand.’

SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’, the expertise which brings your product or service to the first page of Google when users type it in as a keyword. Very few searchers look past page one on Google.

 

Who is to blame?

It is not an easy job to undo bad publicity ­- which is why it is so important to get it right in the first place.

What the officials of Bialystok do now is crucially important. Get it right, and disaster can be turned into triumph. Get it wrong, Bialystok, and you will serve as an eternal warning, not only to mayors in other Polish cities, but also to city councils throughout the world.

The Creative Director of the agency who designed the logo, said in their defence that the similarity between the logos ‘was just a coincidence’. That’s just not good enough.

The branding company should have got it right. They were paid well enough to do all the research into the purity of the new brand to guarantee its uniqueness. ‘Of-the-peg’ branding doesn’t work.

To quote Albert Einstein: ‘You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it’. Resolving this kind of mistake is too important to leave in the hands of people who don’t know enough about what they’re doing. If they handle this wrongly, Bialystok will just be throwing good money after bad.

 

Global Branding:  Putting it right

From a global branding perspective, the way to put it right is to look for the silver lining ­­- and capitalize on it.

The silver lining here is that Bialystok will be on the international map (even if most people can’t pronounce it: that ‘l’ in the middle is pronounced ‘w’).

But what happens then depends very much on the client. What do they want? What do they want to sell? Who do they want to attract? What image do they want to project locally – and globally?

What do the residents of Bialystok want? Rumour has it that the people who live in Bialystok had no idea what their logo represents, and didn’t recognize the outline of their town which appeared in the centre. Wouldn’t they rather you knew, for example, that Zubrowka Vodka (Bison Vodka) which you can buy in Waitrose, comes from that region? And Mel Brooks brought some kind of fame to the city when he named a character after it in the film ‘The Producers’ (the one with ‘Springtime for Hitler’).  Also the inventor of Esperanto (a constructed language designed for international communication), Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof, was born in 1859 in Białystok.

Ebranding goes wrong when inexperienced branders get carried away by their own cleverness. It goes right when the online presence reflects honest values on the ground.

What Bialystok needs now is some expert help in devising a short-term response to the current crisis which will lead seamlessly into a long-term strategy for establishing a distinctive and unique ‘brand image’ which reflects who they are and who they can become, while making sure that they maximize their return on money already spent. It is not impossible to resolve the current crisis to their advantage and to establish Bialystok as a city to be proud of.

Jan Cisek and Susan Norman, 29 December 2008

Ebranding and verbal identity consultants with PROPERO Digital

http://www.properodigital.com