Washington Residents Just Saying No to “SayWA”
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 03.27.06 | 12:26 PM ET
Writers of tourism slogans are having a bad month. This time it’s the folks in Washington who are getting grief for their SayWA campaign. It’s not that some people find it offensive, like Australia’s latest slogan. It’s that people simply don’t get it. “Thirty-five years ago I smoked dope and probably could have come up with something like that,” Darrell Bryan, general manager of Victoria Clipper, the largest tour operator in the Northwest, told the Seattle Times. “To me, it’s better to have no slogan than to come up with something like that. There’s too much scratching the head about ‘What does that mean?’”
The Washington State Tourism Office’s “32-member brand development task force” took 18 months to arrive at “SayWA,” and in the last couple of weeks newspapers around the state have taken shots at the slogan. Still, the state isn’t giving up on it yet. “It is a brand, not a slogan,” Washington State Tourism Director Peter McMillin told the Los Angeles Times. “It is a catchy phrase, and it evolved from the research we did, the branding process.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Jim 03.27.06 | 1:30 PM ET
Memo to the “brand development task force”: It’s time to re-think “the branding process.”
TambourineMan 03.28.06 | 2:01 AM ET
“There’s too much scratching the head about ‘What does that mean?’”
Ha! Sounds like old Darrell needs to start smoking dope again. Or maybe not…
Annette in Alaska 03.28.06 | 1:04 PM ET
Quite a few years ago Missouri had a nifty little tourism slogan: “Missouri Loves Company!” Catchy…. Fun… It works.
Well, the powers that be (er, were) in my hometown thought it worked so well, that we ended up with: “Chattanooga Loves Company!”
No words; I still just shake my head.