Why “Toronto: You Belong Here” Belongs Here, Pt. II

Back in January, a million miles removed from this sticky-tropical Toronto day, I posted about how much I liked the slogan “Toronto: You Belong Here.” Originally devised as a post-SARS “please don’t flee the city!” campaign by Lastman-era ‘crats, it’s a much stronger slogan, I think, than Toronto Unlimited, with more emotional pull. And it can still be used, with varying ad copy and imagery, to appeal to those “oh-so-hip” Cleveland and Buffalo alt-weekly readers that January’s much-critiqued Live With Culture campaign was targeting.

Following that post, others suggested to me that “You Belong Here” might not be the only gem lingering in the city’s branding past. After talking to a few different people with knowledge of the city’s marketing history and visiting the city archives to look through old tourism brochures, I found that the city’s struggle to identify and self-identify itself in an attractive, accurate way has indeed been a long road. The result was an article in this past Sunday’s Star, which you can read here.

In the wake of that piece, I’ve received some interesting ideas and views from others. Olivia Chow notes that “You Belong Here” had a terrific Chinese translation that “Unlimited” does not: “Toronto: hearts connecting with hearts.” Jostein Algroy, who moved here 8 years ago from Europe, writes “the people who work out these campaigns need to think differently – as I tell friends that comes for a visit – please, don’t compare Toronto to American cities nor to European cities – a mistake I did in the beginning. Toronto is itself. It is ‘strong’ as is and need to be experienced as such.” And Valerie Jones, a Los Angeles resident who recently visited our city, tries her own hand at solving some of our slogan woes by offering a few that “infer the diversity that I experienced [while visiting] and yet express a confident level of pride in the uniqueness of Toronto.” “Toronto: Like No Other” and “Toronto: Free to Be” are a couple of her suggestions.

Whether you agree with those respondents or not, it seems that many people feel the pain of civic branding difficulties, whether they live here or elsewhere. The Next American City‘s spring issue has an article about city slogans; author David Godfrey notes that cities everywhere, “taking their cue from the corporate world, [are stepping] up their efforts to build their brands and sum up themselves in short catchy phrases.” At the same time, many of these “irrelevant new mottos… often fail to represent the true identities of cities.”

Reading Godfrey’s piece does prompt one to give thanks that Toronto is not known as “Always Turned On” (Atlantic City’s latest moniker), “America’s No. 1 Wired City” (Tacoma) or “See Something New” (Cleveland). But it also reinforces disappointment that city planners here and elsewhere would feel compelled to choose blandness over specificity, and novelty over heart.