BBC. There’s no getting away from it. When they decide to do something, they do it properly.
BBC Sports Personality of the Year, or SPOTY, as it is known in-house, once again demonstrated that, at large-scale live events, they are at the top of their game. Costing a lot less than the MTV Awards to stage, they managed to fill the Arena with 6,000 more people and make the place look more like a live event than a soulless studio.
In terms of audience reach and media exposure, it was also worth a lot more, in the UK. While the MTV Awards would have been beamed round the globe, in terms of the UK the audience would have been minuscule compared to that on BBC1. Yet, both were probably equally valuable in terms of raising awareness and attracting visitors to the city and region.
Recent research into future branding indicates that Liverpool is now seen as a city “on the up”, edgy, young, cool and irreverent, something that played right to MTV’s Kevin the Teenager profile, but BBC1’s older demographic would have counterbalanced. That same research indicated that 70% of people across the UK knew that Liverpool was Capital of Culture, 30% recognised the waterfront on the orange 08 badge and 99% of the local population knew 2008 was our Culture Year. Guess the other 1% must have been on holiday!
The latter statistics are interesting as, with 2009 looming, the 08 logo obviously has a limited shelf-life, so there are discussions going on about future branding.
However, with those levels of recognition, something most major brands would kill for, that great Americanism “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” seems suitably apt. My vote has gone to simply replacing the 08 with an 09 and changing the strap line to “European Cultural Capital – Est 2008”. And it should be free for anyone to use.
But, going back to the BBC. I have had a few run-ins with them over the year, and still think they could have done more, but overall, once they “got it”, they have given the city some fantastic exposure and none more supportive than our own Radio Merseyside. I suspect they would have liked to have done more but were restricted by centralist policies, the burden all local media seem to have to bear these days.
Above all, though, what the BBC is good at is corporate identity, and they have always known that that comes from a real sense of identity. Nationally, they can be infuriatingly London-centric, regionally they are restricted by resources, but locally they know that loyalty comes from long-established identity. Hence Radio Merseyside reflects its coverage area, not market research.
We could actually learn a few lessons about branding from the BBC.
