Branding goes ker-splat!

• Author: McCorkle, Vern

Fostering and encouraging the success and development of ethical business enterprise is what Alaska Business Monthly is about. That is why we become justifiably testy whenever we find that Alaska businesses may have been done wrong.

Well, it's happened again.

Another all-Alaskan project has been shipped out of state because it was felt that there wasn't enough creative talent to do it here.

It all began with spending, all told, somewhere just outside of a cool half million dollars to create and promote, wonder of wonders, promotion plans for Anchorage--a super grand scheme to help Outsiders know who we are and what Alaska is about.

Over time, three top-notch outfits will have chipped in to foot the bill: the Anchorage Economic Development Corp. (AEDC), the Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau (ACVB), and the Municipality of Anchorage (Muni.) All are Anchorage-based, and all want to see economic development and the tourist/convention business flourish in Anchorage, they proclaim.

To brand us, high-powered East Coast and later, well-intended Colorado agencies, presumably with Alaska experience, were asked to do the work that nobody here was qualified to do. Well, we've been branded, all right. They labored and brought forth something it will take years to live down: "Anchorage Big Wild Life!" Most everybody knew we were big, but wild? Shades of Gold Rush and pipeline days! Wild then, yes, but now that we are growing up and trying to mature, wild just doesn't get it. That is not what potential economic development enterprises want to hear about us. They need to know about government and fiscal...