smaller but powerful – funny city marketing

When I first heard about our new contest “Würzburg – the world class province”,
I remembered the city marketing campaign “Herrlich ehrlich” (Amazingly honest)  for my hometown Osnabrück, which started in 2007. Comparing the city with round about 180.000 inhabitants to Berlin, they wanted to show that Osnabrück is not as big, but surely as interesting as the German capital.
Osnabrück became a “Weltstädtchen” (little metroplitan, the ending “-chen” is a diminutive form which can be appended to words to make them “cute”)  and Germany’s “Kapitälchen” (little capital) and places and streets changed their names from “Heger Tor” to “Brandenburger Törchen” and from Große Straße to “Kurfürstendämmchen”.

Quite sad, i think, that many  Osnabrück inhabitants couldn’t identify with this city campaign, and thus, an initiative started a guerilla sticker campaign against this diminutive of their town with slogans like “ehrlich entbehrlich” or ” ganz schön blödchen”. But this controversial feedback made the whole campaign even funnier and more powerful. I think that smaller cities like Osnabrück, or in this case Würzburg, don’t need to belittle themselves when compared to bigger cities. And there’s no better way to prove their strength and character then by being proud and throw in a little self irony ; ) I loved the humor of this campaign and perhaps it can give you some inspiration for this great and interesting contest “Würzburg – the world class province”. Let it grow!

thanx for the pictures to http://blog.plazahotel.de!