Why build a municipal brand?

The most striking reason for building a municipal brand is to build the trust and confidence of key audiences such as residents, investors, businesses, and funders.

Here, the misplaced notion that a brand is a logo falls well short of the mark. You can spend a fortune designing a new logo or conceptualising a strapline but it means very little without substance. Empty promises are short-lived and don’t build brands, trust and confidence.

Why do you need a municipal brand that stands for something?

Because it needs to resonate with your audience. With ‘trust’ and ‘confidence’ as overarching objectives, it becomes real when you break it down in a practical way:

• A happy and fulfilled community allows people to live, strive and thrive. This need impacts social coherence, community stability, talent attraction, and the environment to grow. A municipal brand must resonate with these basic human needs in a believable way which is experienced.
• Investors, big or small, need to connect with what you have to offer. It’s not just about the opportunity presented to investors but also sustainability. This means skilled and committed municipal leadership and officials; a track record of governance and service delivery; infrastructure and safety, and a vision for the future which both investors and residents can relate to.

Whether the investor is a REIT property group or a small entrepreneur, they both deliver community needs, employment opportunities, and additional revenue into the region which in turn, helps your residents to live, thrive, and strive, creating a full-circle brand.

But what does our brand sell?

A question often asked. Do we sell public services?

No, public service is the sector that a municipal brand operates in. What you sell – what makes up your brand – is what it is that enables you to deliver quality public services consistently.

Let’s take Weskus’ brand values as an example.

What do well sell?

ACTIVE – after due process, the ability to take decisive action. We don’t sit on important matters; we make it happen.

ASPIRATIONAL – a belief in developing and growing our people so that we consistently deliver quality services and maintain our commitment to clean governance. Also, so that we stay relevant in a changing world.

INCLUSIVE – a commitment to having diverse cultures, age groups, qualifications, and skills in our team. Apart from being representative of our community, this mix provides fresh perspectives.

SOLID – this brand value is clearly evidenced in our financial statements, clean audit reports, and the high regard that funders have for us. This also talks to consistency.

For each brand value, we can provide supporting evidence. Each piece of evidence tells a story of our brand – a chapter in our book – which resonates and builds trust and confidence with our brand’s audiences.

RW ‘Boffie’ Strydom
Executive Mayor
Weskus Distrik