between the lines
pointed perspectives and penetrating punditry

The Baskin-Robbins
of American Cities
by Jack Cashill

In marketing lingo, we call it the USP, unique selling proposition. Every product’s got one, the point of differentiation, the one that makes consumers pick your product over the next guy’s.

Hallmark is for those folks “who care enough to send the very best.” At Burger King, you could “have it your way.” Holiday Inn offered “no surprises.” Avis “tries harder,” or at least they used to.

More than a few American cities have their own USP. Nashville comes to mind. Or Orlando. Or Las Vegas. Or New Orleans. For years, San Antonio hung its weary Stetson on the Alamo, then got clever and opened its River Walk. Indianapolis dozed for about a century and a half as “Naptown” before repositioning itself as America’s amateur sports capital. Branson alchemized itself from Ozark dross into heartland gold in the breathtaking space of a generation.

Yes, a city can transform itself. Lord knows Kansas City has thought long and hard about doing so. No city in America has suffered through more identity crises than this one: rambunctious cow town, wide-open jazz Mecca, the city of fountains, America’s most livable city, barbecue capital, what?

The area’s accumulated icons are not merely at odds with themselves. They are fully at war. The city’s logo is a fountain or at least something quite like it. Cows adorn major public spaces. The airport features prairie grass. Saxophones bedeck many a public banner—and why not, the city owns the world’s most expensive. And if St. Louis has an appropriately symbolic arch as its most visible symbol, Kansas City has Bartle’s grand, giant thingamabobs, altogether too apt in their incoherence.

A year ago, Kansas City was poised to redefine itself, to find its own USP and share it with the world. Taking the lead was Mayor Kay Barnes and the city’s always eager Convention and Visitors Bureau. They had the right idea and a whole lot of momentum. And God bless them for trying. It was a noble effort. Along the way, however, they ran into the only thing that marketers dread more than a reduced budget.

The “Committee.”

The Committee’s handiwork is everywhere, starting with the very name of the campaign, “Come Back for the Flavor of Kansas City.”

Huh?

I once produced a 30-second TV spot for a large corporation. To help me edit the spot, the company sent along five management types plus the agency account executive. Here we were, seven adult men sitting together in a space no bigger than my downstairs’ bathroom trying to come to a consensus on every one of the spot’s 30 or so edit calls.

These were decent, smart guys, but they all kind of just wanted to justify their presence. Who can blame them?

“Isn’t that kid scene too, well, smarmy?” “Why not use page turns instead of cuts?” “Why are we using Helvetica on the phone number?”

“Should the music be that loud?”

And, of course, “Are you sure our logo is up there long enough?”

A spot that would have taken me two hours max took us a minimum of eight and ended up being 37 seconds long, a rather inconvenient length for network TV.

“Come Back for the Flavor of Kansas City?”
Let me recreate how the Flavor campaign may have come to be named. I know this is how it happened because this is how it always happens.

A young agency guy named Ryan with a pony tail and a black shirt buttoned to the neck came up with the line, “Kansas City: A Flavor All Its Own.”
Ryan thought it was pretty cool. He explained correctly that “flavor” captures not only steak and barbecue thing but also the urban flavor of jazz and blues. Win-win. His colleagues dug it. The line had a nice ring.

When Ryan presented his idea to the Committee, they were keen on it. They could see the political potential in an idea that was so perfectly fin de siecle, so perfectly nonjudgmental that city leaders would not have to differentiate among flavors. Every flavor was as valid as every other flavor.

That was OK with Ryan. He couldn’t care less about the politics of it. He was already writing the OMNI acceptance speech for this high-profile campaign when the Committee intervened once again.

New research had just come in. It showed that 45 percent of the city’s leisure travelers come to Kansas City to visit friends and family. Eighty-two percent are repeat visitors. This was the market. These were the people that had to be reached. The campaign would have to tell them specifically that Kansas City wanted them back. But the planning was too far along to create a campaign based on the city’s return-visitor rate, a potential USP in its own right.

The Committee, trying to keep everyone happy, simply grafted this new theme onto the old one. And thus was born the unlovely “Come Back for the Flavor of Kansas City” campaign. Ryan, I am sure, is still furious.

But he ought not be. His idea was not all that sound to begin with. As clever as “A Flavor All Its Own” may seem, it has no USP. None. Every city in America has a flavor. Exactly what flavor is Kansas City? Where are we on the spectrum between vanilla and tutti-frutti? Seattle knows. San Francisco surely knows. Salina knows. We still don’t, and worse, potential visitors don’t either.

The invitation for the kickoff rally of the “Come Back for the Flavor of Kansas City” campaign at Kansas City’s Union Station shone some Freudian light on the anxiety the hospitality industry is feeling. The date listed for the event: “September 11, 2002.”

They meant January.

Mayor Barnes then proceeded to capture the paradoxical beauty of this open-ended campaign.

“Kansas City really deserves a flavor all its own,” she told the good-looking crowd of about 100. But it was not her job to even suggest what that flavor should be. She added quickly, “Kansas City has a lot of different ingredients that go into our great flavor.”

In other words, every entity that participates in the “Flavor” campaign adds a flavor to the mulligan stew that Kansas City will claim to be.

“One of the great flavors of Kansas City,” Barnes told the audience, was the excellent percussion band performing that day, “Sticks of Thunder.” The only problem with the Sticks is that the band isn’t indigenous to Kansas City and, in fact, was just passing through.

I believe Ryan picked the Sticks. The three guys wore ponytails and were all dressed in black with their top buttons buttoned. Ryan wasn’t sure what they said about Kansas City, but hey, they were cool.

The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.