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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/394777
bcbusINess.ca November 2014 BCBusiness 61 cause of a months-long garbage strike and who made sure NPA mayoral can- didate Peter Ladner never got a chance to define a new image for his party— will be working hard to create its own brand for LaPointe: a gas-guzzling old NPA Oldsmobile, belching out smoke and being driven by someone with a learner's licence. It was clear by mid- September where Vision was going with LaPointe, working to rebrand him as a guy who's fumbling his way through policy, who's analyzing and consider- ing and holding meetings but not really coming out with anything. Weak. In contrast, Vision's team will focus on a Robertson image as an experi- enced, decisive leader and keep blaring out the cloud of words that push the hot buttons for his target audience. Who are they? Almost everyone under 35, Vision operatives claim. A Chinese community that has an affinity for the strong-leader image. The city's many enviro-liberals, who value lifestyle and natu- ral and green above many other things. No, the brand message will emphasize, you don't like everything Robert- son does or even the way he does it. But he's getting them done: rental apartments, bike lanes, opposition to oil tankers, a plan for the Downtown Eastside, a new green building code. His team will have one advantage: they've been branding him for years already in a way that has made him even stronger than the party he's twice led to victory. Robertson is green, he rides his bike, he ran a successful organic-juice company, and he champi- ons the new wave of green, tech-savvy local businesses. Vision has also copied a couple of successful ideas from elsewhere. One, it has capitalized on the ultimate brand- ing strategy, which is to create an expe- rience for people rather than tell them how great you are. Political science professor Eleanora Pasotti, at the Uni- versity of California in Santa Cruz, has written a book about how new progres- sive mayors in former machine-politics cities have gained traction in the late 20th century. "They didn't say 'Vote for me and you'll get a reward.' They put on festivals. They built parks. They spon- sored concerts," says Pasotti. "Those experiences create a notion of togeth- erness, of a community. So you think, 'I feel good about this mayor.'" That's something the Vision team, which has championed car-free street festivals, food trucks, farmers' markets, fund- raisers disguised as art-gallery parties and the mayor as star DJ at local clubs, has mastered—and it's far more power- ful than blasting voters with speeches and policy platforms to get them to vote for you. "It's a subtle and undermining instrument," says Pasotti. "You have the logo, the slogans, the imagery, but it's really anchored in experience." Vision has also copied the micro- marketing style made famous by the Obama 2008 campaign in the States and also by Stephen Harper's Conservatives. In the first nine months of 2014, anyone on Vision's exhaustive mailing list has received over a dozen mass emails, per- sonally addressed, that invite feedback or donations or sign-ups on specific top- ics: tanker traffic, transit, homelessness, the Pride parade. People who respond to one message, but not another, will find themselves in a special place on the database, so that people who care about homelessness will get more messages that talk specifically about homeless- ness and those who care about tankers, tankers. But Robertson and Vision are going to have to fight a new guerrilla strat- egy brought over from the world of anti-corporate activism: the anti-brand campaign. In the business world, cor- porate brands are taking serious hits from well-crafted anti-brand websites. "These websites exchange informa- tion, organize boycotts and coordinate lawsuits with the help of social media platforms as they retake control of a brand's messaging, which can in the long-term be harmful to a brand's rep- utation," Klaudia Karwowski, a Ger- man specialist in this new form of consumer activism, wrote last August in a blog run by the global Duffy Agency. Vision's many opponents have been using a lot of the same tactics as those fighting Apple and Nike, with negative twists on Vision slo- gans (Engaged City becomes Enraged City), lawsuits and the constant repetition of new catch phrases ($25,000 lunches for the developer-backed party) turning the brand upside-down. Vision's new image: In the clutches of developers and their money. Secretive. Arrogant. Unwilling to listen to communities. So fixated on bike lanes that they don't care about whether anyone else can get through the city. What gives that rebranding extra oomph is that it doesn't come overtly Dianne Watts, in surrey, has been the quintessential blend of suburban Real Housewives style with a layer of contemporary coolness. In calgary, Naheed Nenshi, running his election campaigns through social media, personifies a new calgary that is more than just cowboy hats and oil