Today	Sun	Mon
Clear 18°/6°	Clear 16°/7°	Clear 20°/11°

48 Comments October 2, 2010 at 2:00 pm

news

City of Toronto Hearts xoTO, Too

xoTO’s logo.

It’s not a slogan, it’s not for tourists, and it’s not much yet, but Torontoist has learned that the City of Toronto is in the midst of rolling out a new campaign all revolving around four letters: “xoTO.” The campaign’s aim is simple: get Torontonians to talk more about what they love about their city.

The first public step was the quiet launch of an @xoTO Twitter, which right now is busy re-tweeting snippets of information about Saturday night’s Nuit Blanche. That’s for good reason: the second step is a series of projections during the all-night event, which’ll see tweets tagged #xoTO thrown onto walls in each of the three zones. After that, it depends—it’s hoped that the initiative will be shaped by what the public wants from it rather than what the City decrees it ought to be.

@xoTO

The unveiling of xoTO also coincides with Torontoist’s Toronto slogan competition—one finalist of which is “Fall in XO with TO.” That’s a happy coincidence, though: the City has had the brand in the works for months, and how they’re using the phrase might even mitigate some concerns about whether out-of-towners will get it. They’re not supposed to.

Comments

http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

xoTO arigatou mister roboto.
http://undefined spacejack

This slogan is so TO.
http://undefined Renata

“xô” is a common slang for “leave!” “go away” in portuguese. I wonder the oh so many jokes around the portuguese community… This slogan makes me lol.
rapi

this works for english speaking world…what about the rest of us. english is a second language for me and xo was certainly not mentioned by any of my teachers…
http://undefined lunarworks

Oh no, we can’t use it because other people might not immediately understand it!
Here’s a thought: Howabout we educate people on what it MEANS rather than chickening out, as usual.
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

Branding rule of thumb: if it has to be explained or taught, then it has already proved itself as a failure.
rapi

sorry, did not mean to be a party pooper…(bty…this was not in the textbooks, either)
http://undefined lunarworks

Then we can’t use anything in Toronto, because half the people come from somewhere else and will need it explained to them regardless.
No matter what the slogan is, some groups of people will scratch their heads.
http://undefined rek

Not to go against the current love-in Torontoist readers have for design, but what’s with this logo? The X is rendered as a Y with a tail, the O has a poorly-rendered word balloon you can’t see at small sizes, and for a logo they want to associate with love, it’s cold and geometric.
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

Precisely. Which is why this isn’t the greatest collective use of our time.
http://undefined torontothegreat

Huh? You apparently do not work in branding/marketing. Please don’t spread lies to win a point in a debate. What does Samsung mean? What about Volvo? What about Honda? Ikea? etc, etc.
Before you go running to your translation dictionary I’ll tell you: Hey, I don’t know, but I know the brand(s).
http://undefined thelemur

If Toronto is going to be a brand with a brand identity, it should be as ‘Toronto’. What Samsung, Volvo, IKEA, Honda, etc., actually mean is irrelevant to consumers because they already know what those brand names represent. It makes no sense to push ‘TO’ as a brand when ‘Toronto’ the brand is not yet sufficiently on outsiders’ radar screen.
http://www.torontoist.com David Topping

This campaign—this one right here—isn’t for outsiders, though, no?
http://undefined thelemur

However, as a campaign aimed at Torontonians, xoTO doesn’t suffer from the ‘what is TO?’ factor, obviously.
http://undefined thelemur

Yes, I realized that right after I posted that. I’m not crazy about ‘TO’ as a promotional hook for anything, but at least it doesn’t provoke headscratching among citizens of Toronto.
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

Well, I appreciate your wiping out a decade of my first career in marketing communications.
As to your so-so (xo-TO?) point, you know the brands you name-dropped evolved so because of one predominant history that doesn’t come from coming up with cheeky word marks, slogans, and graphics: those brands built their reputations from a consistency of quality, which in every case took decades to hone. Tell that to these folks or to marchFIRST, all of which tried hard to establish that brand and failed. Or better yet, watch (or re-watch) Michael Moore’s Roger & Me for those vain, desperate attempts by Flint, Michigan, to re-imagine and re-brand itself as a tourist destination, replete with slogan (“Flint. Our new spark will surprise you!” [starting at 1m53s]).
But with the democratization of tools like graphic design software and with the fad of the past twenty years of “re-imagining” existing brands, coupled with the furious feast of so many new, (often) online businesses fighting over a finite amount of audience attention (we can only remember so much), it’s become commonplace to have armchair enthusiasts of branding to define what it means for the rest of us — even those of us who have paid the rent and fed ourselves from monies made in these very areas.
So please: spare me. Go one further: spare us all.
http://undefined torontothegreat

I don’t know where to start. A brand IS an identity, I think you mean “with brand equity”.
“What Samsung, Volvo, IKEA, Honda, etc., actually mean is irrelevant to consumers because they already know what those brand names represent.”
Not when they first came to market Think of startup companies such as youtube, flickr, twitter. Does that apply to your logic?
“It makes no sense to push ‘TO’ as a brand when ‘Toronto’ the brand is not yet sufficiently on outsiders’ radar screen.”
But the goal of branding is to help push an identity to the property, in this case T.O./Toronto. I think you mean: “it makes no sense to market TO as a brand when Toronto the brand is not yet sufficiently on the outsiders radar screen” – which again makes no sense as that’s the end goal of marketing as a sum.
Branding is part of marketing. Marketing is an exercise in branding. The 2 are not mutually exclusive or inclusive to one another.
http://undefined torontothegreat

A failure in marketing is not necessarily a failure in branding. A failure in product quality is also not a failure in branding and vica versa. re: FLINT.
The first link you post talks about VC money pouring into the pockets of .dot bombs. It’s a lot of static, but is there a point to it that actually relates to this discussion?
The second link is akin to the first link in that it speaks of poor money management. What either link has to do with branding as a concept is beyond me, more importantly, what either link has to do with your absurd statement on branding is also beyond me.
Your initial statement was simple enough:
“Branding rule of thumb: if it has to be explained or taught, then it has already proved itself as a failure.”
- Flickr
- YouTube
- Facebook
- FeedBurner
- Tumblr
- etc, etc, etc, etc.
WHAT are these? WHAT do they mean? There, I had to ask, because the names of these brands mean NOTHING at first glance, thought or word. By your “decade of experience” and absurd first statement these brands shouldn’t even exist today.
“Well, I appreciate your wiping out a decade of my first career in marketing communications.”
I would demand my money back than. Cleary you are not an authority on Branding or Marketing. Thank you.
http://undefined torontothegreat

“Branding rule of thumb: if it has to be explained or taught, then it has already proved itself as a failure.”
You seem to be the only “authority” pushing this mantra. Good luck with that.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=A0r&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&q=branding%2B%22if+it+has+to+be+explained+or+taught%2C+then+it+has+already+proved+itself+as+a+failure.%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
http://undefined torontothegreat

sorry, I should have included this in my last reply to you. When you say this:
“it’s become commonplace to have armchair enthusiasts of branding to define what it means for the rest of us — even those of us who have paid the rent and fed ourselves from monies made in these very areas.”
Do you mean to say you know me and know what I do for a living?
You start your statement with this:
“Well, I appreciate your wiping out a decade of my first career in marketing communications.”
Do you not see the irony in your statement?
http://undefined thelemur

Okay, brand equity then. I’m not in marketing.
My point is that as long as consumers can associate the brand name with the right product, it doesn’t matter if they don’t know what the brand name actually means rather than what the product is.
All that potential car buyers need to know in the first place is that Volvo = car. Safe car, car from Sweden, etc., are all nice things for the consumer to know, but secondary. What Volvo means in Latin, the alchemical significance of the Volvo symbol with regard to Volvo’s origins? Way down the list of useful information for consumers.
Ditto Samsung = appliances/electronics (and if you live in Korea … cars as well). Honda is a proper name but depending on the target market, the only thing the consumer needs to do is think ‘car’ on hearing it(or ‘lawnmower’, or ‘motorcycle’). The actual significance of the name is irrelevant. Think of how many things Yamaha represents, none of them inherently stated by the name itself.
Not when they first came to market Think of startup companies such as youtube, flickr, twitter. Does that apply to your logic?
No. Those were all invented to suggest in some way what the product/service was. No one named Toronto ‘Toronto’ to get the message across that it would be a good place to visit or do business. And yes, I know that ‘IKEA’ was coined by its founder, without much thought for conveying what the business was about.
I think you mean: “it makes no sense to market TO as a brand when Toronto the brand is not yet sufficiently on the outsiders radar screen” – which again makes no sense as that’s the end goal of marketing as a sum
That is what I meant: that it should be ‘Toronto’ that we are trying to get onto the radar screen because the city IS Toronto and ‘Toronto’ already has some recognition. It makes no sense to market the city using two names if one is more prominent and already has some recognition.
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

Ah, but branding is a component of marketing. Not only that, but branding is also disproportionately relied upon to exact an effective marketing strategy. The brand is simply a semiotic shorthand for what marketing attempts to communicate.
Marketing cannot succeed without a brand, and yet sometimes the brand language needs not be defined outright for it to be understood universally. Sometimes, an incidental signifier can carry that weight. With Toronto, as much as we groan at its cliché, the representation and shape of the CN Tower silhouette is perhaps the closest such signifier to being an incidental brand for the city as we have probably ever had. New City Hall is a distant second, possibly third behind the threadbare, but historically relevant “Toronto the Good.” The whole point of these discussions on Torontoist and elsewhere, I’m gathering, is that we want more than just that. But rather than letting these next signifiers percolate their way to the collective subconsciousness on their own, we’re vainly trying to induce them through these branding exercises — such as devising new slogans. You can’t reify that which doesn’t want to exist.
Digression aside, you spat out a half-dozen brands from the Web 2.0 world. Wonderful. That half-dozen represent a rarefied exception to effective branding in a compressed time window, not the rule. For those five or six names, how many tens, even thousands of Web 2.0 (and even Web 1.0) companies have been ill-able to reach a brand familiarity saturation? Quite a few, and probably hard to make an accurate census count.
In each of the five or so you cited, each effectively delivered on a promise of their product’s mission. You’ve only established a correlational observation, not a causative one. You ask, “What do they mean?” They mean to describe in that semiotic shorthand the services they deliver. The shorthand is understood, because a critical mass of users are familiar with the service. That burden of familiarity helps informs the equity of said brands. But to suggest or imply the “Facebook” brand mark and brand name was what drove people to use the product is putting cart before horse.
Also, I think you’re being kind of a jerk. Not that it matters.
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

See, I think you generally get the gist of it just fine, even if torontothegreat might comparably question you.
http://undefined thelemur

I was going to add that if I’ve understood torontothegreat correctly, the meaning of a brand name is generally arbitrary to some degree with regard to what it represents, which I would agree with (although there are of course brands that mean exactly what they say and vice versa). However, the marketing of Toronto should aim to create associations in consumers’ minds with ‘Toronto’ and not with ‘TO’, even though neither has any real ‘meaning’ than the other.
http://undefined torontothegreat

I appreciate your clarification. I actually didn’t see your second reply to me so I’m sorry I replied to you lol.
“That is what I meant: that it should be ‘Toronto’ that we are trying to get onto the radar screen because the city IS Toronto and ‘Toronto’ already has some recognition. It makes no sense to market the city using two names if one is more prominent and already has some recognition.”
Interesting. I think with a good marketing campaign, TO could be a very eloquent & unique brand and really encompasses alot without encasing it into linear statement of “Toronto” as a geographical place in the world. What I mean is that when I think of Toronto, I think of the city proper and this point is obvs debateable. TO on the other hand for some reason, in my mind anyways, I think of Toronto as the city proper and the GTA – Ahhhhhh perception!!!
TO could work very well as a brand for Toronto. When we think of Toronto, we have to think “what does this product mean?” “what does this product offer?” etc. We certainly don’t mean Toronto as geographically bound to city proper (or do we?). The product means the city and the GTA (IMHO). So not using Toronto (again, IMHO) is a good start. We’re offering a unique, world class city which also has access to non-city attractions, such as Oakville’s harbourfront, or Markham’s Asian markets. Again, we’re not referring it to “Toronto, Canada” (31.977057,79.013672).
This particular piece though, seems like a cheap knock off, of I
http://undefined torontothegreat

wierd, part of my text got cut off.
Finishing that para with:
This particular piece though, seems like a cheap knock off, of I
http://undefined torontothegreat

wierder. Comment parser does not like the less than sign.
Finishing that para with (again):
This particular piece though, seems like a cheap knock off, of I ‘love’ NY to me though. I like the concept of using TO over Toronto, however, the xo meaning escapes me. Hug/Kiss Toronto? No, thanks.
David, feel free to delete the 1st reply to myself.
http://undefined thelemur

Maybe they’re trying to imply a ‘Yo!’ and something about speaking up/expression as well as stuff about loving Toronto. That seems like a lot to ask of a tag/logo.
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

Maybe you ought to read chapter 73 of Matt Haig’s Brand Failures: The Truth About the Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time. In short, he summarized a case study of when the UK’s Royal Mail tried to re-brand itself as “Consignia” in 2002. From page 207:

“‘It’s a poor excuse to say that Royal Mail could be confusing when it takes a paragraph to explain what Consignia means.’”

But please, don’t take my word for it. In fact, just keep on beating down whatever point I deliver in this discussion.
Also good reading: Even More Offensive Marketing by Hugh Davidson.
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

There’s no irony in getting bored and burnt out by what basically amounts to a zero-sum rat race. It was a career I could take on without a university degree, and I did well with it. Then I started post-secondary study on topics which matter a lot more to me and have the qualitative substance I found lacking in the world of mar-comm.
Is that ironic? The only irony I hear is in your suggestion that one must be married to a single career for life when the generational and statistical trend for the last 30 years has been a gentle, but steady drift away from the single, cradle-to-grave career. That went out with Fordism and North America’s permanent decline of the secondary (manufacturing) sector economy starting with the late 1970s.
http://undefined torontothegreat

I still don’t agree with you at all. Branding is certainly not a component of marketing but rather has to do with the perception of the product itself. Brand awareness (or identity) can be used to measure marketing efforts, but aren’t necessarily the marketing crux. Which is why Brands are marketed differently for different markets, as perception may differ slightly or extremely to it’s audiences.
“Marketing cannot succeed without a brand”
It most certainly can. Example: I throw an event, put up a million posters with no logo/identity and expect 100 people to show up. Event takes place and there are 100 people at my event. Marketing success? Yes. Branding success? No.
“Digression aside, you spat out a half-dozen brands from the Web 2.0 world. Wonderful. That half-dozen represent a rarefied exception to effective branding in a compressed time window…”
But this can be applied to my first example(s) of Samsung etc too, which is outside of any compressed window. The examples I have given are only rare in that they are (fairly) new. When a company first emerges, (let’s use Ikea as an example), are they the “rare exception” too? Hardly. Throughout product history, brands have had to fight for identification. They are ALL the exception to the rule until they have sucessfully identified themselves to consumers. Products are rarely the literal of what they do. The brand “Ivory” is most certainly not called “bar of soap” etc.
“Also, I think you’re being kind of a jerk. Not that it matters.”
Yea, I get that a lot. I don’t mean to be. I chalk it up to huge cultural differences between us. It was also a bit jerkish to call me an “armchair brand expert” as well or at the very least infer it.
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

Agreed.
Lest we jam our TO.
http://undefined torontothegreat

I need to clarify this statement:
Branding is certainly not a component of marketing but rather has to do with the perception of the product itself.
What I mean is that branding “can” be a component of marketing but doesn’t have to be. Branding means something very different then marketing.
http://undefined torontothegreat

You are completely missing the point. From the same book.
“Lessons from Consignia
* Don’t change for the sake of change. The public perception was that the whole rebranding exercise was pointless. This impression was confirmed by a lack of advertising. ‘We thought what would be the point of advertising if all you would be saying is this name change is happening which is not going to affect you?’ justifies Dragon Brands’ Keith Wells.
* Realize that business realities have an impact. The new brand suffered due to the fact it coincided with a poor period of corporate performance. ”
They lacked marketing. This isn’t the brands fault.
http://undefined torontothegreat

I made no suggestion and once again you’ve completely missed the point of my statement. Please re-read (without assumption) what I wrote, then re-think your answer to me.
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

You mean Milton Glaser’s fine “I <3 NY?”
http://undefined torontothegreat

Agree 100% with your design critique.
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

Tedious and off-topic.
thelemur

There was nothing inherently wrong with Consignia, except that the marketing didn’t convey what Consignia was supposed to represent in addition to what ‘Royal Mail’ had conveyed for decades and ‘Consignia’ didn’t convey much of anything by itself.
thelemur

IKEA is a good example of a brand that gained significance over time. The founder’s name plus the name of his property and the town it was in says nothing about what the company offered, but it was certainly memorable and combined with a Swedish colour scheme and arresting advertising it managed to become synonymous with affordable European furniture. You could change it to something just as un-transparent but you’d have to start all over again.
http://undefined mark.

I know many of the commenters in this thread are experts on marketing, design and fonts and have been commenting on Torontoist well before they asked for ideas on a Toronto branding slogan. What were your guys’ submissions?
http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

Hi Mark. When Torontoist made a call for submissions, I didn’t feel the contest made a lot of strategic sense, nor did it seem like anything more than a Torontoist exercise. If Toronto was seriously looking for a re-imagined brand image, then any kind of public contest would have had several public and private interests (e.g., City of Toronto, Toronto Board of Trade, Toronto City Summit Alliance, Spacing, etc.) jointly behind the initiative.
That said, I did make a comment last week with a direction on where I would have taken it. That idea would have played on the descended meaning of the word “Toronto” itself, which J.M.S. Careless explained in Toronto to 1918: An Illustrated History (a book that many a former student under Professor Emeritus Gunter Gad knows well):

”The Indian [sic] way north from Toronto (which may originally have meant “Trees in the Water”, though “Lake Opening” and “Place of Meeting” are other possibilities) could make use of several river entries around the landing area [. . .] Hence the Carrying Place at its start saw repeated transits, and shifting encampments or longer-lasting villages dotted about the landing-ground as this primitive traffic pattern went on through time without written record. [Careless 1984, 9]” (emphasis mine)

Mark, I was actually thrilled to see you draw reader attention to the literal origins of “Toronto the Good,” because its etymology is still not known by a lot of people. I was especially cheeky when I saw this “new” slogan idea selected as a finalist. Whether we wanted it or not, it was the working slogan we’ve inherited for several generations hence. Obviously, it is not emblematic of the Toronto we have today, or the Toronto that is likely to be in the coming decades.
So yes, “Gather Around” as a root, with plays on that as applicable — from “Gather Around, Toronto” (with comma) for an imperative approach to draw together people living here, to “Gather Around Toronto” (sans comma) to declaratively emote a “Hey, an awesome place to visit” tourism approach.
But again, none of this contest or discussion matters in the long-term scheme of things.
mark.

Thanks! Glad you liked my intervention on Toronto the Good. It surfaced just the other day when people freaked out about ‘Torontonians’ drinking and smoking up during Nuit Blanche. I’ve been preoccupied with space and movement and hadn’t thought much about the etymology of ‘Toronto’.. now wondering about ‘York.’
Amanda Factor

Yuck. That logo is ugly, just like Toronto Unlimited. Can’t the City of Toronto afford to hire decent graphic designers?
http://undefined Marc Lostracco

The logo is brutal. It works much better using the wordmark I designed for the mockup poster (IMHO, natch). I also read theirs as “yo, TO.”
http://undefined rek

I agree, though I think “TO” ought to have periods in there to aid pronunciation. The hand drawn “XO” (in lipstick, it suggests) makes a huge difference.
http://undefined rek

Being unofficial doesn’t mean it isn’t worth exploring, even if all you get out of the process is what doesn’t work. I assume that you marketing types did your fair share of unsolicited student work as part of your education just as we design students had to.
http://undefined Marc Lostracco

Here are some punctuation options. The periods are a bit of a drag, but I know what you’re saying. I was struggling with whether or not to add them when I was doing the poster mockup a couple of weeks ago.

Torontoist

news

City of Toronto Hearts xoTO, Too

Comments

Advertisement

Advertisement

Social Media

Special Notices