The project that completes the main city marketing
activities in Amsterdam is the development of a
new branding campaign, launched in September
2004. The main idea behind the campaign is that
over recent years Amsterdam has had too many
brand carriers, for example ‘Amsterdam Has It’,
‘Small City, Big Business’ and ‘Cool City’. The
new approach is that branding needs continuity, slogans
need time to be recognized and become effective.
Past slogans were not thought to provide an
‘umbrella’ for Amsterdam’s key values and benefits;
they tended, instead, to cover a single dimension or
focus on a single target group, something that was
deemed a wrong approach. It was also considered
that the Amsterdam brand has been badly managed
with no agreement on brand usage and uniformity of
style. A ‘tangible’ new positioning both for the city
and the region was perceived as necessary, a new
brand that would typify the city’s benefits and values
(City of Amsterdam, 2004).
An agency was chosen to develop a new logo for
the city and to suggest and develop a branding campaign.
In the new approach, ‘‘Amsterdam Partners
has opted for a slogan that will serve as an umbrella
in both a practical and intrinsic sense, will be
versatile without being implicit and will stand for
Amsterdam’s main benefits and values’’ (City of
Amsterdam, 2004, p. 45). They did not want to
choose one or two dimensions and thereby exclude
others. Amsterdam’s strengths are thought to lie in
the combination of associations, the versatile city
and the effort was to profile the entire range of
dimensions as strongly as possible. Doubtful as it is
that this is even possible, the city has chosen ‘I
amsterdam’ (Figure 3) as the new slogan and it will
be the ‘flag’ on city marketing plans. It will be one
of the instruments used to establish Amsterdam’s
name in the world; it is the ‘‘motto that creates the
brand for the city and the people of Amsterdam’’
(www.iamsterdam.com). The choice of the specific
slogan was based on the assessment that it is clear,
short and powerful. ‘I amsterdam’ is considered easy
to remember and with great potential for people to
identify with it. All the above qualities are of course
subject to doubt, especially as the slogan relies so
heavily on a linguistic association in a language foreign
to the city’s residents.
The goal is for many organisations, companies and
events to be able to benefit from the new brand