Herding Cats - How to Rebrand a County
Herding Cats - How to Rebrand a County
In June 2017, Delaware County in Ohio rolled out its new brand identity. Arguably it had never defined its brand identity, so this was a monumental undertaking over the course of eight months for both the County and Guide Studio, the Cleveland-based design firm selected for the project. Because county governments are so decentralized in structure, a project like this presented many unique challenges. Delaware County, a rapidly growing Central Ohio county with 204,500 residents, is governed by 15 autonomous elected officials—who did not have to participate if they didn’t want to. In this session, we share our hard-won insights on how to define a county brand, how to get buy-in across the organization, and how to implement the new brand successfully—with a one-person communications shop, no less! Phase 1 – “Anything is better than what we have now”: the history of the county’s existing brand and why we decided to rebrand; Phase 2 – “Getting organized”: lobbying people throughout the county organization, easing concerns and getting buy-in; Phase 3 – “Issuing an RFP”: this included explaining what the term “public record” means to design firms that had never submitted a proposal to a civic organization; Phase 4 – “The Project”: how we did what we did and what the design results were; Phase 5 – “Roll-Out”: how we launched the new branding materials; Phase 6 – “After Action Review”: what we did well and what we would have done differently.