Branding Hudson

In the world of marketing and advertising, branding seems to have a larger meaning that involves such complex and nuanced concepts as perception, recognition, and image, but discussions of branding in Hudson tend to reduce the term to two things--a logo and a slogan. The idea of branding Hudson is frightening to those who believe that the phenomenon of Hudson defies easy definition and cannot be adequately communicated in a logo and a slogan.

Screen capture: Dan Udell

Unschooled in the subtleties of the industry, I tend to think of branding and marketing as two different things--related, yes, but different. Marketing being general; branding more specific. Apparently, that is not true. If you watch Dan Udell's partial coverage of the "Hudson Tourism Branding Brainstorm!" event that took place last Friday, you will hear Chris McManus, at about 3:35, paraphrase something I said before Udell started recording: "If you don't brand, you're seceding. You're allowing somebody else to brand you." In truth, what I said was something like, "If Hudson doesn't market itself, others will market it for us," making specific reference to the episode of Stay Here, Netflix's real estate reality show, which effectively marketed Hudson as a place to invest in a building and see a $72,000 annual return on investment by offering it for short-term rental on Airbnb.

At about 3:52 in the video, Jeff Starr expresses something that many of us have thought. He starts out by saying he believed for years there had been a very subtle tourism board at work, because "the New York Times routinely had amazing, glowing articles about Hudson," and he figured someone had to be planting them. He then concludes: "Don't tamper with it. It's working just fine. You get into this silly tampering, and it ruins the coolness quality." Interestingly, three years ago a Bard senior named Nora Cady analyzed those very articles to demonstrate how they had driven the gentrification of Hudson--gentrification being seen as not a good thing: "Fit to Print: Hudson's Gentrification in the New York Times, 1985-2016."

Screen capture: Dan Udell

Most of the ten people gathered around the table for the "Branding Brainstorm" on Friday seemed to agree that Hudson needed to avoid "jumping the shark" and losing its appeal to visitors. John Kane expressed the opinion that Hudson had already "peaked past the cool factor," saying people used to come from Manhattan, then from Brooklyn, and now they are coming from Long Island and "down the shore." Of course, the ten people who had come out for the brainstorming were a pretty homogeneous lot--white, college educated, somewhere on the spectrum of middle class; the majority were over 50, in some cases by a decade or more, and half of them lived on Worth Avenue. Hardly a representative sampling of Hudson.

The issue of branding Hudson is complicated and contentious. There are those people who fear branding because they don't want Hudson reduced to a logo and a tagline. Then there are those who don't want branding or marketing because they don't want tourism, arguing that tourism, like gentrification, displaces "indigenous" people. It has been suggested that before we can market Hudson to the world we need to come to some consensus about our vision for the future in a new comprehensive plan, although consensus in Hudson always seems elusive.

If we must brand Hudson, maybe we should imitate Austin and Portland (it's not clear which city used it first) and come up with our own version of "Keep Austin/Portland Weird." Since the adjective used most often to describe Hudson in those "amazing, glowing articles" that chronicled and encouraged the city's renaissance is quirky, I propose that this be our slogan: "Keep Hudson Quirky."
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