White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Lackluster City? Get a Brand

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If your city is mostly famous for being between two other cities, if its main claim to fame is “It’s a great place to raise children,” then it’s time for your city fathers to take a course in branding.
Cities that prosper — that bring in company headquarters, tourists and where the crazy rich want be — have to have distinguished brands.
New York’s brand is glorious excess. It has the brand of ever higher, stranger skyscrapers. The world’s most successful media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, has just plunked down $57.2 million for what looks to be the world’s most lonely living space: the top four floors of a 60-story, bronze-and-glass building of a kind that is now transforming the Manhattan skyline. Take a small plot of land, build until what you get is slender tower that defies nature and looks as though its purpose is to challenge a strong wind.
Murdoch’s aerie has glass on four sides, and he can see forever, at the least until other towers rise up. If you want to spy on him, you will have to do it by drone. His own paparazzi might try to get a picture using a drone, but where would they publish it?
If you have a few million to spare you can still get in the East 23rd Street building. But those that would make an eagle jealous have gone to Murdoch. Most of us would be scared up there: a new take on “Naked and Afraid” because without neighbors, there is no need to wear clothes.
Cities in the United States that have done the branding thing right are New Orleans, jazz and food; San Francisco, cable cars and attitude; Boston, higher education and hospitals (eds and meds); and Chicago, wind and the uber-hub airport. Washington is a special case: great museums, the White House and the Capitol, and palpable delusions of importance.
The branding ace, running in front worldwide, is London. The Romans gave it a head start, but it was not until the Swinging Sixties that London became a destination for the globe. You would think that the place had enough branding with the old features: Tower Bridge, the Tower, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, plus the Changing of the Guard.
But no. London keeps adding dizzying new features to its brand superiority. There is the Tate Modern, an art gallery in an old power station; the London Eye, a Ferris wheel that has captured world attention and city imitators; a bridge across the Thames River that wobbles, and now a new bridge is planned with gardens and shops on it. Then there are the taxis — black boxes, that remind you where you are in case you have overlooked the big red buses.
The current mayor of London, Boris Johnson (who has branded himself as a possible prime minister) has been keen to preserve and protect the London brand by insisting on preserving the double-decker buses, distinctive taxis and other expensive city bric-a-brac, because it is a hell of an investment.
Sure Paris has the Eiffel Tower, but it is aging. Rome has the Coliseum — talk about aging. And St. Petersburg has the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. But for city branding, London is in front and pulling away, as the Brits exploit the cash value of differentness.
Providence and Baltimore are two cities of which I am particularly fond. But I would urge the city leadership in both places to get a brand, a trademark. It pays. Rides (London Eye, Eiffel Tower elevators, the San Francisco cable cars) are sure winners. Could I suggest an amphibious train across Baltimore Harbor, and the mother of all rollercoasters – big, but not scary — in Providence?
Like London and New York, these days you have got to think big in city branding, or you will miss the incredible fun and profit of a city being silly.
Frivolity pays, ask London’s Boris Johnson — and share a thought for Rupert Murdoch, stuck up in the sky. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Boris Johnson: The Man Who Would Be British Prime Minister

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Make a note of the name: Boris Johnson. He is mayor of London. And in a few years, he has a high chance of becoming British prime minister.

In a time when politicians tend to be bland, and to believe it necessary to claim a politically correct pedigree, Johnson is a mold- breaker. 

He has been larger-than-life and in scrapes of his own making throughout one of the most colorful careers in public life. Yet Johnson has the knack for transmuting disaster into celebrity — and celebrity into fame and electoral success.

At Balliol College, Oxford, some claim he won the student presidency by pretending to support the Social Democratic Party, the dominant faction at the university. He was a member of Oxford's Bullingdon Club – a raucous dining group that specialized in trashing restaurants and willingly paying for the damages later. A film about these goings on, called “The Riot Club,” is in preparation. 

After taking a less-than-impressive degree in Classics, Johnson, whose family on both sides was well-connected, launched himself on the world as a management consultant. But that was short-lived because, as he said, “Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth-profit matrix and stay conscious.”

On to journalism — a refuge of sorts for scoundrels — and a trainee job at The Times of London. Oops! Johnson gets fired for falsifying a quote from his godfather. He works on a provincial paper for a while, and then moves on to the high-Tory Daily Telegraph, where he rises to assistant editor.

Meanwhile, Johnson has political ambitions and gets himself elected as a Conservative member of Parliament, where his antics enliven the House of Commons. As the British are a lot less sensitive about conflicts of interest than are Americans, soon he was editing the prestigious literary and conservative political magazine The Spectator while rising in the ranks of the Conservative Party. He is one of the most prolific writers to have sat in the House of Commons since Winston Churchill.

Johnson, who has a great, white shock of hair that belies the fact the one grandfather was Turkish, rides a bicycle and litters his oratory with classical references. He likes to use his knowledge of the ancient world to illustrate contemporary issues. He even made a television program on the Romans.

But scandal has a way of finding Johnson and his rake’s progress toward greatness. The Spectator – with a tiny staff — erupted sexual scandal during his time in the editor's chair. Get this: the publisher, an American woman, was having an affair with a blind member of the British cabinet, the features writer was having an affair with a secretary and Johnson, rising political star and father of four, was, you got it, in what the British like to call a “leg over” with a star columnist.

He was demoted in the conservative party, so he left the House of Commons and ran for mayor of London, defeating the socialist Ken Livingstone. He won a second term again running against Livingstone.

As mayor Johnson championed a revolutionary, new London bus. He cheered on London and the Olympics, took credit for its success and when he got stranded on a zip line with two British flags, one in each hand, he turned the disaster into another Johnson publicity success. He entertained the world’s press while suspended in mid-air.

Johnson is now planning a return to national politics in 2015, when he will contest an expectedly safe Conservative seat near London. As a kind of campaign opener, he has penned an extraordinary article in which he links London to ancient Athens and British democracy to the original. He glosses over the failings of the Greek state and the fact that Pericles, his hero, finally lost to the Spartans, while humorously making antiquity available to the British voter of today. It is political literary fun at its best.

Johnson’s re-entry into national politics will come at a critical moment when extreme-right parties threaten the old conservative bloc and Prime Minister David Cameron’s standing is low, and he is accused of the “re-toxification” of the Conservative Party. 

Read one of the greatest pieces of political writing by seeking out The Spectator on the Web. It is glorious stuff. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate