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3.27.06

Washington Residents Just Saying No to “SayWA”

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.”

Posted by Michael Yessis • 3.27.06
Categories: Weblog • Media Addict • Nation Branding • Tres Loco