The Strong Towns Podcast
Strong cities know who they are. In today's episode, Chuck is joined by Ryan Short, founder of Civic Brand. They discuss how uncovering a shared identity guides smarter decisions, strengthens civic pride, and helps communities thrive.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. Today I am going to have a chat with Ryan Short. He is the co-founder of Civic Brand, which is a place-based consultancy, and he's actually written a book called "The Civic Brand: The Power and Responsibility of Place." I'm doing this introduction on my own today, before I chat with Ryan, because Ryan asked me to write the foreword for his book, and I did it. I did this because not only do I like Ryan and I like Civic Brand and I like the work that they're doing, but this is a really important book. There is a lot of rethinking in this book, and we're going to get into it in the podcast, but I wanted to start out by reading this foreword.
A lot of you asked me why I don't read my own books, and I don't read my own books because I'm not very good at it. So maybe you suffer through this one with me, and then you can tell me, "Chuck, you should read your own books." I don't think so, though. This is the foreword that I wrote for Ryan, and it's short by comparison. So we'll do that, and then we'll pick up with Ryan.
"In my work with cities, I've seen a familiar pattern. A place feels itself falling behind so it reaches for something, anything, that might spark momentum. A bypass highway, a new industrial park, a national retail chain. If we just landed this one employer, this one project, this one splashy win, then we'll be back on track. For a moment, maybe that works, but more often, the result is a place that feels less like itself. More fragile, more dependent on outside forces, and more disconnected from the people who actually live there.
In "The Civic Brand," Ryan Short tells us why, and more importantly, he shows us what to do instead. This book lays out a compelling argument that what's missing from so many of our communities is not funding or planning or even leadership. It's a shared sense of identity, a story we tell ourselves and each other about who we are, what we value, and what kind of future we're building together. Not a slogan or a logo, but a brand in the truest sense, a vision that connects policy, design, investment and culture.
That vision doesn't come from a focus group or a top-down campaign. It's uncovered patiently through deep engagement, and it belongs to everyone. Ryan doesn't just advocate for branding as a technical exercise. He invites us to treat branding as stewardship. When done right, a civic brand becomes the connective tissue between people and place. It guides decisions. It strengthens civic pride. It allows local leaders -- elected, appointed or informal -- to act with clarity and purpose, even in the face of short-term pressures. It helps us resist the temptation to imitate other places in the name of progress.
This idea that a place brand must be civic first and not merely promotional is a crucial shift. We live in a time when places are being commodified and standardized at a breathtaking pace. Entire neighborhoods are being remade according to the latest trend or urbanist fad. This is often done at the expense of the very people who gave those places their culture and character. In these civic transactions, we often witness branding used to cover up extraction, to sell something shiny on the surface while the substance erodes underneath. This book is a reminder that we can do better, that we must do better.
The framework Ryan offers -- a triple bottom line of people, profit and place -- is not just a moral argument, although it is that. It's also a practical one. Communities that center these three values are more resilient. They don't just chase growth; they guide it. They don't just market themselves to outsiders; they shape themselves in service of their people. That, in turn, makes them more attractive, more stable and more worth investing in, financially, emotionally, across generations.
What I appreciate most about this book is that it doesn't flinch from complexity. Cities are messy. They're shaped by overlapping systems of governance, money, memory and meaning. There's no simple fix, but there is a better way to work, and that better way starts with listening -- really listening -- to the people who make a place what it is. It starts with asking the right questions, and it starts with a commitment to design, not for appearances but for belonging.
Ryan writes about all this with humility, clarity and deep experience. He's been in the field, on the ground, in the workshops. He knows what it means to talk with real people, not just the loudest voices but the quiet ones who rarely get asked. He's honest about the work it takes to build something lasting. He's not interested in easy wins. He's interested in getting it right.
If you're reading this book as a city leader, technical advisor, or someone who just cares a lot about their place, I encourage you to approach it not as a manual, but as an invitation to rediscover what makes your place worth loving, to resist the pull towards sameness, to build something rooted and resilient. You don't need to copy what someone else did. You don't need to wait for a savior or a slogan. You need to understand who you really are in all its messiness and beauty, then bring your people along in shaping what comes next. That's the promise of a civic brand, and that's the gift of this book."
Hey, Ryan, how you doing?
I'm doing great. Good to see you, Chuck.
Good to see you. I have a lot of questions. I feel like there's a way I want to tell the story of your book that will resonate with our audience. Because I feel like, when I've talked to people about it, there's a few gaps that people have right off the bat. I don't know if this is how you want to start, but I would like to have you talk a little bit about branding in a commercial sense. What does a company like Nike or -- I'm wearing a Columbia shirt -- think about branding? I think that, in America, we're not citizens as much as we are expected to be consumers. We're in this commercial marketplace, and we've got constant branding coming at us.
Can we establish what that is first? Because what you're doing uses the same branding word, but it's very different. I kind of want to anchor us in something people know. Does that make sense?
Yeah, so when I think about branding in a commercial sense, the two biggest things that come to mind -- and already getting into how it's different than what I'm talking about -- is that, for commercial, it's very much about control. A brand from a commercial sense says, "We want to control everything. We want to control the narrative. We want to control our story. We want to have really tight brand guidelines. This is exactly how our brand can and can't be used."
So I think, one, there's a lot of control involved in a brand. I think the purpose and the intent is a little different too. I think, at its best, a commercial brand is shaping a product. It's not just marketing. I always like to really distinguish between marketing and branding first, because I think with marketing, you are just out there trying to sell something. You're trying to promote it, you're trying to get it in front of the right people. I think with brand, you're trying to shape perception. It's still very outward-focused most of the time.
But I think even commercial branding, at its best, like when Apple thinks about its brand, they hopefully still are making some internal product decisions. Like how they choose what features to use, how they choose its design. So I think even in commercial branding, it's designed to control but also shape its product and narrative, "This is where we as an organization are headed." That's how I think about it.
I do think we naturally blend marketing and branding together, and that's where you get into "It's just all about sales." But for commercial sense, most of the time the brand is there to give direction and attract people to it and shape the perception of what you think you know. So when you see that Columbia jacket on a rack, you already have some information that you know about Columbia that you can apply to this new jacket that you've never seen. You can be like, "Well, I know that it's probably a good quality," so you can skip ahead in your purchasing a little quicker. The brand's like a shortcut to that.
I was thinking about the United Way, and the Red Cross, which are charitable undertakings. They have brands, and the brand drives their mission. I know that my wife talks about Patagonia, and I'm not as familiar with them, but I know that part of their brand is also their corporate ethos and how they work with employees. Maybe talk about that relationship a little bit, because I think I'm understanding the industry of brand and marketing. I want to make sure everybody else grasps it here.
Yeah, I think a brand, whether it's for a place or a commercial entity, is a North Star of like, "This is where we're headed." I think it can and should shape you internally -- your product development people, your marketing people, your finance, everybody that is working for your company. That should be a collective mission of what we're trying to do.
I think on the external side, if you do that really well, it's like a head start. It kind of skips ahead in the marketing phase. Marketing is a different task, but it's a lot easier to market something that has a really strong brand. You mentioned Patagonia. Their whole mission of "We're in business to save the planet" should drive very specific fabric choices and process choices, but at the same time, it attracts consumers that also value that to their product.
Yeah, so let's shift to talking about cities. I watch cities, and I think now I'm going to use your terms, because I think cities would call it branding, but what I watch them do is marketing. They're deciding what's going to be the logo. We did one of these here in Brainerd. I was joking that our tagline should be "Brainerd: A Great Place to Park" because of the excessive amounts of parking. But I think people who deal with cities see this -- they're going through a rebranding, or we're rebranding this -- and they end up with a logo and a tagline and a mural somewhere.
What is that process that people are going through? What's a civic brand? Because there's a clear difference here. Maybe set up what I would say is the normal thing people do.
Yeah, I think most of the time the average person, even at place branding conferences, people are just talking about logos and marketing. I think when people talk about a brand, they immediately go to the logo, the visual identity that represents something. That's certainly a part of it. But you know, I think you've talked about religion and faith, and I think you wouldn't say that a Christian wouldn't say that the cross is their logo, right? I think at its best, something like a cross is a simple symbol that inherently means nothing. But over years and years, it has come to have a lot of meaning, and now it's a reminder of thousands of years of history and meaning and text and stories that can be reminded really quickly with a symbol.
So I think branding at its best is it's not the thing, it's not the symbol, it's not the logo. It's everything that that logo and symbol reminds you of. That's the brand. That's the really important part. I think people miss that, and they just focus on the logo. That's why you see Cracker Barrel in the news with people piling on the rebrand. Austin kind of fell into a similar thing, because they weren't talking about "What is Austin about? What do we stand for?" It was like, "Here's the new logo."
I do think people naturally fall into just the logo piece, because we say that all the time -- "Here's our new brand, and it's just the new logo." I feel like we've kind of always had an uphill battle because for the last decade talking about this, we're always having to explain what we mean by brand. Everybody kind of thinks they have a working definition. What I started to see was people would say, "A brand is more than a logo." They knew that line, but then they would pause and wouldn't really be able to clarify what it is. That's kind of why I wrote the book -- to get real intentional about what a brand is and what it can be for a place.
I still think a place brand could be used purely to put people in hotels, to bring in external investment. That can be a brand's purpose, but I don't think that's a good brand. That's why I wanted to create a new definition of a civic brand. A civic brand is really a place brand done right. I kind of have a laundry list of what that means.
Let's talk about what a civic brand is. I will tell you I started out with an idea of what it was, and as I got through the book, my own idea evolved. I've kind of been ashamed for a long time of the comprehensive planning work I did as a young planner, because it was really bad, and the public engagement work I did as a young planner was really bad too. As I read your book, I became even more ashamed. It was like I was revealed again. I had to struggle with this idea that I didn't capture it, even though I wanted to.
So what, in its best sense, is a civic brand? How should we feel about it in our own communities?
Yeah, so in the book, there are these manifesto statements that start to state what it is. I think at its core, one of the first things I introduce is the idea of the triple bottom line as a simple way to take one step closer to being a civic brand, which is a place brand done right. Meaning it's not purely profit driven. It's not just about "How do we get visitors here? How do we sell externally?" We think about, "What is our impact on our local people? What is our impact on our community? What is our impact on our place?"
The triple bottom line has that third P as planet. In the book, I shift it to place because I feel like our planet is the ultimate place, so by shifting to place, you still capture the environmental aspects. But I think when you shift it to place, you also start to capture the built environment and other things that planet doesn't quite capture.
A civic brand considers a triple bottom line. It considers profit, considers people and considers place. Starting with profit, your work talks about building wealth in cities and the constraints we have. If a business is not profitable, it's going to have a really hard time taking care of its people and fulfilling its mission. Profit is not a bad thing. It's not a bad word. It's only a problem when that's your only measure of success.
A place brand that is just "Let's get as many visitors here" overruns you with over-tourism. We've seen in Barcelona, they're shooting visitors with water guns saying "Tourists go home." That's when you get really destructive gentrification that isn't just a place improving, but it's a place losing its soul. An easy step into being having a civic brand is just to when you make decisions, pause for a moment. You're probably already considering the profit impacts, hopefully. Second, consider the impacts on local people. Third, measure the impacts on our place.
I think that's the easiest way to start to segment into what I mean by civic brand. Once you get into how you're going to benefit our people, that's where you have to go really deep into engagement to understand. Because people are complex. People have really diverse, different opinions about things. I spent a lot of time talking about how a civic brand is very engagement-driven, and has to be. That's kind of the short version of what it is.
Let me delve into this. I've been working on the Strong Towns project since 2008 and I remember very early on, I had someone approach me who essentially offered to help me with marketing. I was like, "Yeah, I need a new logo. Help me, I'm an engineer, I don't know this stuff." What he came back to me with was an exercise about trying to understand who I was and what this thing was trying to do. I remember being annoyed by it. I don't have time for this, I'm trying to do this thing in front of me. Why do I have to figure out what my audience is? My audience is anybody who will listen. The whole world is my audience.
Fast forward now, and I think that we have matured enough as an organization where I can talk to you in depth about who our target audience is, what the things that motivates them are, how they interact with us, what that says about us and our brand, what our brand is, and how internally we take actions. The fact that we have a brand motivates us internally to be consistent with the expectations of people.
Talk to me about in a city, that tension between "I want to bring in new business, I want to do the road widening, I want to get the federal grant I've got to do" and this kind of deeper process for who you are. You were nodding when I talked about the marketing guy at the beginning. Why is that important to have this deeper understanding before you actually go off and try to do that streetscape project or that next thing you want to do?
The interesting thing about your timeline is at first you were annoyed and not wanting to think about that, and now you can speak at length about who you are. Probably in between there, and probably pretty close to the beginning, you had that identity, you had your mission, you had your vision. But it probably just wasn't articulated perfectly clearly. You were figuring it out. I'm sure there's a lot of people that write to clarify their own thoughts, not because they already have these thoughts.
It was super aspirational, not deep within me.
Right. There was probably a few ways and a few audiences it could go. Is it more civic leaders or grassroots? You were feeling it out. I think that's where a lot of cities are, because they haven't gotten to that point where they've taken the time to pause and look back or articulate. We almost never use the term "rebranding" because if you think about that in-between spot where you were and where you are now, that brand at some point was already there. It was just under the surface, and maybe you didn't have the correct words, and maybe the logo didn't capture it, but it was there in people. People could probably talk about it at different points, but you couldn't sum it up in one statement yet. But it took a while to do that.
I think so many cities are at that spot where they're reacting to problems and solving them. I just think cities are constantly in this reactive mode. They're reacting to what Council has told staff is the priority of this month, and that might shift next month when upset residents are complaining about the next thing. So most cities have never had the chance to really pause and take that reflective look, because they're at that early stage -- "I'm annoyed, I've got real problems to solve. I'm trying to get this website up and these logos out, this road widened and this rec center built. I don't have time to think about who we are."
That's wild when you're thinking about really big financial decisions that you're making. I had somebody that read the book recently, and they loved it. They were a big fan of the book, especially the public engagement chapters, but they said, "I don't think our community is ready for a brand." I was like, "Well, you're still going to be making decisions every single day. What's guiding those decisions?" You might not be ready for a brand, but that's not stopping you from making really monumental, generational decisions. That's concerning -- what's guiding that? Who's guiding these decisions? Is it just an individual council member's initiative for one project?
I think that's where most cities are. They're drinking from the fire hose. They're just reacting to things, and they have good intentions, and they're trying to do the best thing they can, but there isn't a coordinated sense of "This is where we're collectively headed, and this is how this project is part of getting us there." I'm sure you can say every article you write, every topic, every talk you give, is a step towards achieving your mission.
Yes, absolutely. We have a real strong sense of who we are. I feel like what you've described, thinking about my city, we have a sense of who we are collectively, but it's not been enunciated in a way that defines our actions.
I want you to push back on this. As I read this, I've been long a critic of city comprehensive planning. I feel like most of it is make-work projects for planners and employment guarantees for engineers. Here's where we're going to run the sewer, water, and here's what things should be zoned. Yes, we want community character, and that means wood siding on buildings. I mean, literally, that kind of stuff is what a lot of comprehensive plans seem to exist for. I've wanted to throw out the entire process. I think it's really dumb.
But then I read your book, and I'm like, "No, this is actually the planning process we should have." Do you think of it that way? I want you to talk about the public engagement part and how you go about that, because I feel like when we do comprehensive plans, it's almost performative. We're going through the motions of sticker charts on the walls and public surveys, and then we massage that a little bit and come up with a list of projects. But there's never really a soul to it.
Yeah, I would largely agree, because I think there's a massive gap between what a comprehensive plan can and should be and what it is when it gets executed. I'm a big believer in the idealistic version of what a comp plan can and should be, but I would say 99 out of 100 fail to hit what it could be.
When it does engagement, it's treating engagement as a task, not a culture. My mantra with a civic brand is that engagement is a culture, not a task. So you work through these exercises. At best, there's an attempt to be equitable, but it comes off often as tokenism. You're just trying to hit a demographic number so your report looks better.
I think everybody that does a comprehensive plan would say there is a vision for the city, we're doing visioning work. But I think 99 times out of 100 it's just a generic statement that could apply to every city. We want to be a safe, welcoming place.
My city is unique, right? Every comp plan says "Insert city here is a unique city." I'm like, "No, not really." In some ways, but not in the ways you're talking about.
I think "welcoming" is really easy to point out, because every city will say that it wants to be welcoming or that it is welcoming. When you do public engagement and talk to certain people, they will all say, "Our city is so welcoming." They will tell you stories about how during COVID their community came together. People are nice, relatively everywhere, within certain pockets.
But then you start to really go deep with engagement, and you realize there's a lot of people that don't feel welcome. Standing on the corner of an intersection with cars flying by -- does this feel welcoming? So you start to get into the really lived experiences. It's like, "Okay, that's nice that one person said they felt welcoming, that we say we're welcoming on our banners. But if it doesn't feel welcoming, if our decisions aren't driving us to become more welcoming, then we're not using that brand and vision to its full potential. It's just a statement."
There's nothing wrong with saying "welcoming," but how are your actions with how you design your roads, how you build your neighborhoods? Are you making them more welcoming?
So when you're pursuing a civic brand, what does public engagement look like? You describe it not as a finite thing you do. Like, "We're going to start the public engagement process on January 1, and it's going to end on July 31 and then we've completed public engagement." What does it look like in an ideal sense?
I like to use a lot of analogies in the book. The analogy I use is I have an old 1987 Land Cruiser. If I don't drive it for several weeks, when I go out to start it, it's really a lot of effort to get it started. But if I'm driving it regularly, it fires right up. I think engagement is the same way. If we're not going to do engagement for three years, and then we've got a comp plan and we're going to do engagement, it's like going out and trying to start this car that you haven't driven. It's a cold start.
You're not getting anywhere. Sometimes we walk into a project, whether it's a comp plan or a branding project, and that's how it is. We've got to really sit there to cold start that engagement process. The goal is, "Okay, once we get it running, how do we arm that community with the tools to keep that going? Drive this every day, talk to these people every day. Have this feedback loop."
When you don't, I think our whole system is set up to create this toxic environment with engagement. Residents feel their only outlet is three minutes at public comment, where they speak passionately for three minutes, then they go, "All right, thanks, next." There's not even a dialog or response.
I think first with engagement, it starts with a dialog, but that is not intended just to check a box. It's intended to understand and give people a feedback loop so they can see how their input is valued. I can't tell you how many times we've talked to people and they're like, "Oh, I already took that survey, or I participated in the same focus group a year ago, and nothing ever happened."
I think the first step has to be towards working towards making it a culture of engagement. That's really hard for us to do within a project, because we're still hired for just a set period of time. All we can do is kind of do it and hopefully arm them with the tools to do that better. But I do think if you can do that, people stop feeling like they have to come and just complain. This is my one shot to complain. They feel like they have more opportunity to talk.
For us, it's really about meeting people where they are. But I think a distinction I like to make is that meeting people where they are means physically, right? Don't expect them to come to town hall. We need to go meet people where they are. So that might mean partnering with a certain church or a certain organization and really getting ingrained in that community to reach them. It's physically going where they are.
But one of the things I talk about in the book is how do we meet people where they are emotionally and psychologically? If somebody is worried about their SNAP benefits running out tomorrow, they're probably not super interested in taking your public survey. So how can we meet them where they are? We've done things where in Lubbock, Texas, we partnered with United Supermarkets in a really low-income neighborhood, and we stood there with a stack of cash and paid people $5 to talk to us for five minutes.
At first the city was like, "We can't pay people to talk to us." But when they looked at it -- you paid $20,000 to another firm for a statistically valid survey. They got 300 responses. That's a lot more than $5 per person. We talked to these people who were paying for their groceries largely with SNAP benefits, and they had an extra $5 in their hand. They were very excited.
What was really amazing was they're like, "The city never comes to us. The city never sought my opinion, asked me what I thought." They were overwhelmed. We had a couple people literally almost crying because we were just asking their opinion about something. That person would have never known there was a council meeting. They wouldn't even know what a comp plan is, but they're still a resident. It's going to impact them.
I think considering how can we meet people where they are emotionally and where they're at in life, and how can we help them get to that next stage through engagement, I think is part of that process.
My vision for a city has always been this higher form of collaboration. You've got neighborhoods of people working together, and the city is a way we collaborate as a community. You use the word "stewardship," and you contrast that with control. I feel like the paradigm we kind of default to today is one where the city tries to control their brand, control the message, control the dialog. You get three minutes at public comments, then we're going to gavel you out, and the next person can come in.
But stewardship seems like, and you brought up religion earlier -- you're almost like a church elder where you kind of have the weight of the community on you to represent them, interact with them and be your best self. I'd like you to talk about this shift in your words, because it seems almost impossible to really get to. Can you talk about what mentally needs to happen for a city to make a transformation from scared and defensive to how do we steward this community?
Yeah, I think first I have the utmost respect for city leaders and city staff, because they're often underfunded, overworked. They have all these demands coming at them, and they're just having to react. They're treading water and doing their best to survive, then somebody throws a mandate down with no funding, and that's another thing for them to juggle while they're treading water.
When you're in that kind of crisis mode and you're living and working in crisis mode, you want to block and tackle. You want to take a block approach to just make clarity. So I think that's why we have things like three minutes of public comment -- that's it. We're going to make this decision in a closed session, because we just need to be able to work. I think it's a defense mechanism. Control starts to make it manageable. I don't blame any city for defaulting to control.
As we talked about, a corporate brand is all about control. A corporation can control every message and narrative. But cities are beautifully complex. Cities don't control everything. They control what they control, make light suggestions and taps here, but then the free market and the businesses and the people do things within that ecosystem.
I think the mindset shift has to be that, one, we're not here to puppet master everything. We're here to respond in a stewardship type of way. When people are struggling, can we offer this? Kind of like a parent. I think parenting kids, when you're really overwhelmed, you want to shift into control mode -- "You're going to leave at this time, you're going to wear this." But the reality is we probably need to find that soft pocket where we're comfortable, we're giving guidance and directing, but not dictating. That's hard when you have so many things you're trying to control. So I do think it's maybe a little idealistic to say we're just going to purely steward. But I think that's the goal, and it's okay if we never reach that goal.
I love the parent analogy, because you don't control your kids. I mean, they're born how they are, and you can try to lead them, inspire them, be their parents, but ultimately, from a very young age, they will make all their own choices, whether they want to or not. You can force them momentarily.
You wrote that every place already has a brand, that a brand isn't something you make, it's something you uncover. I have a lot of questions about that, but I think maybe I'll just stop with that and have you comment on this idea that you do have. You already have a brand. I think of my own kids. My oldest one is like a fiery, spunky, "I got all the feelings and I wear them on my shoulder," and the other one is more reserved and thoughtful. They both have their own identity, their own brand, who they are. Talk a little bit about cities and uncovering that brand.
I think a big part of our process is just talking to people, having conversations. You tell me about your place, your city, and people can often talk for days about what they love about their city and place. It's really hard for them to pinpoint one thing in one phrase. But what we found is when we talk to hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, and we get all their variations, we see them almost mentally trying to make sense of it. They know it deep down. They've just never been tasked with articulating it in a sentence.
So they'll kind of briffle talk. If you do that and you look at hundreds, thousands of conversations and analyze it, you will very quickly find this common thread, even through very diverse, different people. People within a community that want it to grow, those that wish it went back to how it was in the 1950s, those that are new to the community, those that have been there for generations -- you will start to find this common underlying thread.
I felt like once we find that thread, we can grab it, put some words around it, and then show it back to them, they're all like, "Yeah, that's it. That's what we were trying to say. That's what we were all talking about. I didn't have the words, but you nailed it." To me, that's what a brand really is. It's not "What do we want to be today? Ooh, that looks attractive. Let's all do that."
So I do think sometimes it's rough and raw and refined, and it's not hitting its potential. It could be really, but it's still in there somewhere.
Let me ask you a negative question, so I want you to push back. I think about my favorite baseball team, the Minnesota Twins. I love them because they're my team. But if you said, "What is their brand?" Their brand is like cheapness and just squandering. Our ownership is horrible and they don't really care about the team winning. They're trying to collect their revenue sharing and move on. What if your city's brand is not one you're proud of?
I think that's the perception part. The current leadership, the current team management, is negative. That's not everything that the Twins are, right? That's like current leadership, their current activation. But there's something about their history. There's something about a time you feel when you go to a game, maybe with your kid. There's something about how it feels when you walk in that ballpark. There's something about celebrating wins together. There's something about going through defeat together. There's still something else besides their leadership choices and their specific decisions that is attracting you to be a Twins fan. Maybe it's memories of Kirby Puckett or something in the past. It could be in the past. It could be lost. It could be like you could be actively headed in the opposite direction of it now. But I still think there's something there. There's something of -- you know, you could probably say that's true for every baseball team, just like nostalgia and all-American. It just feels like I'm into this.
It's a great answer, because I look at my city and I'm burdened every day with, "Oh my gosh, if we could fix this and fix that, and this is bad and this is messed up. It's so easy, why are we doing this dumb thing?" But I live here. I'm 52 years old. I chose to live here. I could live anywhere I wanted to. I've chosen to stay here. There's got to be something. I almost feel like there's a therapist that needs to uncover what it is.
Well, we joke all the time that our engagement process is therapy for a community. We lean into, "All right, well, why are you staying here? Is it just that you're a creature of habit, or is there something about the seasons?" There's probably something that we could get to and pinpoint, at least for you. Then if we did that with 50 other people that also stay in Brainerd, I bet we'd wind up at some similar thing. There'd be a couple similar nuggets that you guys all share that aren't the decisions your current city council are making, your roads, or anything like that. It's going to be some deeper thing.
I think that's what gets interesting -- you find those patterns, you recognize patterns, and you start to go, "All right, how can we bring that to the surface?" If we do a really good job of bringing that to the surface, those things you don't like about your city, the decisions that the leaders are making -- if they can be aware of that, if we can put that on the dais behind them on the wall, it starts improving the negative things that you don't like.
Yeah, here's our brand. Are we consistent with this?
Yeah. Then if the Twins did that and they figured that out, when they go to make trades, decisions about where their stadium is going to be or whatever big decisions they're making, would they look at that logo on their hat and go, "Is this congruent with this?" I think I would hope so. I mean, I don't know. You always see problematic players, real superstars, but they come with baggage and problems. I'm sure there's a lot of teams that say, "He's great, but this isn't a fit with us."
It's not our brand.
Yeah, it's not our brand.
This is hopeful, because when I mentioned comprehensive planning, I think when we go through a comprehensive planning process, we're thinking this will drive and shape our community. Then we're always disappointed because it doesn't. I do feel like the end product that you have worked on is something that would actually do that. Can we wrap this up? I feel like there's some people listening today who are like, "This is really interesting. I like it. But give me something tangible. If a city engages with you to build a civic brand, what product do they get at the end? What is the tangible thing that you leave them with?"
Yeah, so I'll give you an example through a past client, what they got, but then what they did with it, because that's the most important thing. The city of High Point, North Carolina -- a lot of people might know them as the furniture industry capital of the world. I've been to their furniture Expo, and their downtown was really nice-looking, but it's like this fake Truman Show downtown because it's all these showrooms that are closed 90% of the time, except for when these big furniture markets are in town.
They had this important industry, but there was just this disengagement. The city was in a weird spot -- "Yeah, we've got the furniture industry. But what does that really mean if you're not part of that?" They had some really serious challenges like a lot of places -- food deserts and a lot of big issues. When we came in, we did that engagement process, which I think was therapy for the community. It brought in a lot of different players. It wasn't just the city government, but the chamber, the visit organization, economic development, the university, large employers, the hospital, the school district -- all these big entities that are ultimately tasked with, in some ways, promoting and selling the place.
You know, they have to recruit somebody to work for their company, and if people don't like that town that it's in, they're not going to come. The university has to recruit people, and the town is like a ceiling to their success. So it was a very therapeutic engagement process. It gets all these players together, and I think getting all those players that aren't the city is really key, because some cities try to do this alone. A comprehensive plan is often just the city. It's not tapping into other partners that often, in my opinion.
Or superficially taps into them.
Yeah, with developers. "What do y'all think?" I think first, just the benefit of going through that process, even if we did no design, no deliverables, no messaging -- just that process is beneficial. But then when we have those conversations, like we started to have about Brainerd, and we unpack what is special about this place, we can package it in a way that gets them fired up, gets them excited, gets them to go, "Yeah, this is actually a pretty great place. We could do some things here. We could make some real improvements in people's lives. Our businesses could hit their goals."
It just creates this momentum. Economics is all about momentum, right? Recessions are just a lack of momentum. Exchanges slow down. High Point with these deliverables of a brand story and a message, and seeing how, really specifically, how different organizations, departments and entities help see what is their role in achieving that brand -- that's really key.
The analogy we use to help them see that is when JFK went and met all the Apollo astronauts. He went in and said, "Hey, I'm Jack Kennedy. What do you do here?" He met all the engineers and scientists, and they told him what they were doing. Then the story has it that the last person he met was the janitor. He was like, "Hey, Jack Kennedy, what are you doing here?" The janitor said, "I'm putting a man on the moon."
He saw how his role led to this bigger mission. In High Point, since we've done that brand and we got all of those people, just like that janitor, seeing their role in the mission -- that brand we created on its own doesn't solve a single problem. But I argue they couldn't have solved any of the problems they have solved without that brand, because that brand was the fuel and gas that brought people together, got them excited, got them inspired, made them feel a little invincible. Maybe like we could tackle these big things.
When they've addressed food deserts and made big changes and improvements, it's easy for a naysayer to go, "Well, the brand didn't really have anything to do with that. Their mayor does a beautiful job. He's running for State Senate, just an amazing speaker and really inspiring." Being able to give him the words and have him take it in his delivery style and essentially spread the gospel -- he has a very preacher-esque way of speaking and firing people up. They were able to tackle some really big, serious problems.
When Council's sitting there and they have that logo behind them, it's not about the logo, but it's everything that when they glance at that logo, it reminds them of. They go, "Oh yeah, we're about this. We need to make the right choice here." That's ultimately, to me, what a civic brand is and what can be accomplished when you get it right.
You just reminded me of a conversation I had with my daughter this week. I think if I said, "What's our family brand?" one of the things we've talked a lot about in my household is we don't quit. You may start dance and it may get tough, but you stick it out to the end of the season. That was the example during high school. She's in a predicament right now where she's having a little bit of challenge, and she comes to me and says, "I won't quit, Dad. I won't quit. I'll see it through to the end, but at the end I want to reevaluate." I'm like, "That's all fair. That's good. Let's do that."
When I'm reading your book and looking at your stuff and thinking about cities like High Point, it's what you do day to day. What you do, even sometimes when it's hard or when we're coming up to a decision that's difficult -- how do you have that conversation with yourself, with the community, about who you are and what your values are and how they're expressed? How do you think about yourself? I just have no limit to how much I'm excited about your book and your work and the impact that it should have on cities in the world. That's just my adulation for all this.
I greatly appreciate that. One, that you agree and kind of get it and see the value in that, and obviously that you contributed the foreword to it. But yeah, I do think it's those little things that we tell ourselves every day, that we remind ourselves of. That's what a brand is, at the end of the day. I do think it's an uphill battle, because the brand is the logo, it's the marketing campaign. That's why I had to write the book. I felt like we almost had to rebrand branding.
Yeah, rebrand branding.
Yeah, you know. Your daughter making that statement -- that's why we want to raise children to have value, so that because we're all going to have really tough decisions, you hope that when you arrive at a decision, there's something that you carry with you that will help you make that decision.
Well, if your brand as a community is "We're a community for all ages," if that's your tagline, who cares if that's your brand? But now when you're looking at housing policy, you're asking, "How do we reflect that? How do we do that?" When you're looking at building a street, you're saying, "Is this safe for all ages?" We gotta ask that question. Obviously not every city will have that as their brand, but I think as we think about who we are and what we want our communities to be, you're asking the essential prerequisite question to building a strong town.
Absolutely. To piggyback off that example you started to give, where I live in Salida, Colorado -- a small mountain town with a beautiful river. There's a ton of rafting guides and ski guides. If you look at our tourism brand, our tourism ads, they're going to have guides rafting down the white water. They're going to show that brand. Well, I do think that this guide culture and what comes out of those activities is essentially what makes this place special. But I think you have to do that extra work to go, "Okay, we don't just have that on our flyer and our poster. When we go to make housing choices, can guides afford to live here? How do we handle seasonal workers?" A lot of these guides live in vans and camp. What are our camping laws? Do we allow somebody to park their van and sleep in it? Or are we going to run them off the street?
I think those little things -- that's how you live the brand. You don't just go, "Okay, guiding is cool. Let's put that on our poster." That's just the marketing side of it. Our community is facing a lot of affordable housing issues and service workers that are a big part of our visitor identity. We need to define that as the brand so that we can protect it and have it trickle down into our policy.
Because I think ultimately, when you asked about stewardship earlier, it needs to find its way into governance. There's still a level of control. It just has to get into its policies. Do our policies allow for people to camp in their car? If that's important to our brand, we better make sure that they can do that, because if we run them out, we don't just lose this season's guides. We lose our whole culture.
I feel like for public officials, if you can work in a way that reinforces your brand, you're just downhill, right? The wind's at your back. The book is "The Civic Brand." I hope everybody goes out and gets it. Like I said, I wrote the foreword. That's the least interesting part of the book, but I did it because I want people to read this book. Ryan, if people want to get a hold of you, get more into your work, follow what you're doing, what's the best place to do that?
Our website is civicbrand.com. You can find me on LinkedIn -- Ryan Short. Reach out. We'd love to talk to you. I've got some speaking events, so I might be coming near you in the future. We're doing work all over the country. If it seems like I'm near you and you want to grab a coffee, I would love to talk to anybody that's interested in this stuff. I do genuinely believe that if the brand's not going to solve the problem, the brand can inspire you to solve the problem. There's a lot of people doing really brilliant work, yourself included, that I think a brand can help. A brand can help the fiscal angle. A brand can help the design and urbanist angle. A brand can help whatever you're trying to solve. It's going to be easier to solve with a brand.
Well, don't you dare come to Minnesota without letting me know.
Yeah, I'll reach out to you for sure.
That would be therapeutic for me. All right, Ryan Short, thanks for your time. Thanks, everybody, for listening, and keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care, friend.
Thanks.
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