Rebranding the City of Los Angeles

Jessica Ruetz. Josh Mayfield. Rohith Bhatia. | Fall 2014

Challenge. Completing the daunting and enormous task of rebranding the City of Los Angeles to fit the diverse culture and the growing business climate.

Ready? This exciting project was my very first exposure to not only the marketing world but also the M-School and the advertising agency environment. How were we going to be able to create a brand that encompassed the diversity of Los Angeles life while staying focused on bringing in new businesses? To tackle this vast project, the team and I met 3 hours every week for 15 weeks. We were lucky to have two very influential mentors, Jerry McGuee from AAAA and Marie Simoni who now works at 72&Sunny, helping us along the way.

Set. Before we could create our brand, we had to conduct original research to find out what Los Angeles can gain from a rebranding. Our 100 respondent survey, an interview with a local technology start up, and three in depth interviews with recent college graduates revealed that there was not only a plethora of opportunity for small businesses but also a need to market towards incentivizing college graduates to stay in the Los Angeles area. From these insights, we created our brand called Start LA:

Los Angeles is the city where everything starts, that is home to a variety of industries, filled with creativity, and has an environment where technology startups can succeed which is evident in the businesses and professionals that currently thrive in LA.

Go! Now that we had our brand, how would we promote the Start LA campaign? First, we would hold a launch party with influential speakers, Start LA Promotion/brand speech, networking, and a big announcement regarding our iPhone application competition. The competition would be to create an application to solve a problem in LA community. For example, to help fix traffic, an app for seeing the sites, etc. The winner would receive web series to get exposure. On top of this, Start LA would have a presence on all social media cites, out of home advertising, media and digital buy, paid search campaign, and campus ambassadors. After hours of work, presented our 15-minute long pitch in front of 90+ professionals on December 11th, 2014. 

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