The city of Bowling Green will be going through changes as a contract promises to heighten city branding efforts — to differing current students, though, the city is already good enough.
Bowling Green City Council voted for a proposal last November set forth by the town’s Convention and Visitor Bureau to plan and raise funds for town branding and marketing services, in conjunction with the Bureau.
“The city is extremely pleased that the CVB is working to create a cohesive community brand and messaging,” Assistant Municipal Administrator Joseph A. Fawcett said via email.
He said this motion is the latest action in a multi-year trend instigated by various community members and organizations for community marketing. Among the interested entities mentioned were the city, the town school system, the University, Downtown BG, the Chamber of Commerce and the CVB.
“At the city we will assist the CVB in their efforts when and how we can,” Fawcett said.
The proposal, which was presented by various local business owners as members of the Bureau, also called for a motel and hotel tax increase of 1 percent. CVB chair member and Wooster Street Best Western owner Todd McGee said in a BG News story about the vote last year the tax increase would help maximize the number of customers using hotels and generate visitors through promotions.
McGee had also said a vital step in the plan was generating a representative brand that would capture the community’s character.
The proposal had stated the funds, after being sufficiently raised, would go toward creating advertisements and commercials for town businesses and University-centric events that would appear on media throughout the Midwest.
Though the proposal looks to affect major changes in the presentation of the town, many students think the presentation is fine as it currently is.
“I just like the small town feel,” Caleb Pryor, freshman computer science major, said. He said he thinks the town was doing a good job with exporting its brand.
This sentiment was shared by senior Amanda Wolf, a media production major. She also mentioned the town’s central square and other “small town” characteristics as elements that worked well to make her interested in investing in the community.
The presence of the University is also an attractive aspect of the town, according to senior broadcast journalism major Molly Wells.
“The University is the biggest form of branding you can find around here,” she said.
Many local businesses benefit from close proximity to the University, she also said. Downtown landmark business like Grounds for Thought and Campus Pollyeyes receive many student patrons and find success due to such customers.
Wells also said different aspects of the community made it “become more like home” than her hometown of Toledo.
However, she said that, aside from the annual Tractor Pull event, the town has few attractive factors which are not the University. She believes that, despite her appreciation for the town in its current state, the lack of features rivaling the school make it difficult for the town to brand itself as something separate from the University.
Wells and other students mentioned the lack of a college town atmosphere during the summer months as another complaint concerning the town’s image. “I lived here over the summer,” Wolf said, “and it is dead.”
Though the town has many attractive features for students, different parts of the city do not work to attract people to the city itself. The branding proposal looks to alleviate some of these issues with a greater social presence in the region.
