Dear Editor:
It looks like we’re about to create a brand identity for Hoboken with monies from an $880,000 NJ Economic Development Fund grant (our tax dollars at work.) Marketing consultants will oversee this counterproductive exercise in collective egotism complete with logo, tagline, color palette and font. We’re told this will create Hoboken’s own unique, distinctive, noteworthy and marketable identity.
The phenomenon of city branding is intended to increase tourism and property values, a way to transform Hoboken from a mere location into a dazzling destination. In the PR world, image, rather than authenticity, reigns supreme and, according to the city’s website Hoboken’s “brand” will “build excitement around its history and culture as a business, residential, and tourism destination.”
Products are branded. First we accept the paradigm that Hoboken is a product for sale. We then fabricate a synthetic, marketable and staged feeling of authenticity that will be conveyed in just a few words.
In a city where the need for increased resiliency is a top priority, it seems absurd that funds that were apparently earmarked for disaster recovery will, instead, fund an unnecessary and expensive public relations campaign. Is it really necessary to spend thousands of dollars manufacturing some sort of symbolic and programmed reality when the real soul of any neighborhood is based on every day routines and local character?
There is something disrespectful about casting aside Hoboken’s very recognizable existing tagline: The Mile Square City. Why would any of us believe that paying to strip away one of the few remaining remnants of the city’s identity is a good thing? Is it simply that monies are available to be divvied out to professionals? Surely there are better ways to invest time and effort to make a positive impact on our city? If we are intent on ignoring the city’s actual history and culture preferring to spend money creating a marketing persona, perhaps we should simply cut to the chase and use one of the following slogans/taglines that are much more reflective of what is really happening here. Best of all, these 25 slogans are available free of charge:
1. Hoboken: Our potholes are bigger
2. Clean money, dirty streets
3. Hoboken: Drowning in Luxury
4. Hoboken: Where looking for a parking space is like panning for gold
5. What affordable housing?
6. Park your cash, not your car
7. Replacing what’s old on a daily basis
8. Hoboken: We were displacing long before Katrina
9. Hoboken: Moving the suburbs into the city
10. Frank who?
11. Boutiques not baseball
12. Diversity got evicted
13. When it rains, it pours & floods
14. Rich? White? Welcome!
15. Ho-Ho Homogenous Hoboken
16. Come see our historic charm, before we tear it down
17. Hoboken: Where transience is king
18. The roar of the jackhammer, the smell of the sewer
19. Hoboken – 10% affordable…at most
20. A commodity, not a community
21. Hoboken – where progress comes with an eviction notice
22. Gentrification is our middle name
23. Hoboken: Buy an ark, not a condo
24. Eat, drink & be merry, for tomorrow we may flood
25. Where displacement is an art form
Cheryl Fallick