Wednesday 6 April 2016

A New Rhode Island Slogan Encounters Social Media’s Wrath

The idea was simple enough — to create a logo and slogan that cast the long-struggling state of Rhode Island in a fresh, more optimistic light to help attract tourists and businesses. A world-renowned designer was hired. Market research was conducted. A $5 million marketing campaign was set. What could go wrong?

Everything, it turns out.

The slogan that emerged — “Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer” — left people confused and spawned lampoons along the lines of “Dumb and Dumber.” A video accompanying the marketing campaign, meant to show all the fun things to do in the state, included a scene shot not in Rhode Island but in Iceland. The website featured restaurants in Massachusetts.

The reaction on Twitter was swift and merciless.

“Forget #coolerandwarmer,” read one message. “When we legalize pot, Rhode Island will be ‘Higher and Lower.’”

Another read: “Maybe they were hoping for a debate like Miller Lite’s ‘Tastes great. Less filling.’”

Another suggested: “How about: ‘Rhode Island: Better than You Think’.”

Within days, the backlash had forced the resignation of the state’s chief marketing officer. The governor, Gina M. Raimondo, a first-term Democrat, tried to stop the hemorrhaging by saying she was scrapping the slogan. But she said she was keeping the logo — a vast white sail — and encouraging businesses, like those that sell the state’s famous wieners, to “make it their own” by putting their own logos in the white space.

The fiasco made for what Ted Nesi, of WPRI, the CBS affiliate in Providence, said was the governor’s “worst week of her governorship so far.”

“She’s never had a warm-and-fuzzy public persona to begin with, and she seems to struggle at moments like this one that require the human touch rather than a spreadsheet,” he wrote in an analysis.

And, he said, the debacle has “fed the narrative that Raimondo is too in thrall to out-of-staters, whether in New York or Davos.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/us/a-new-rhode-island-slogan-encounters-social-medias-wrath.html

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