Is Cincy the “City of Marketing?”
And are we all satisfied with that?
I recently read an article about an exciting startup here in Cincinnati, called Quack, and their experience so far at The Brandery. You can read the article here.
In it there is this quote:
“If San Francisco is known as the city of tech, Cincinnati is the city of marketing.”
I’m just not so sure I am satisfied with Cincinnati as the City of Marketing. I often hear people talk about Cincinnati as this hub of design and branding. While that is true, I am hesitant to call Cincinnati a place where design really thrives.
What we are talking about is creative services instead of creative products. As a creative services professional you design marketing strategies and branding for someone else’s products. This is a very important but also a small subset of the overall design profession.
Are we simply promoting and marketing what other people are building? Is that our destiny as a city? Design as a Service (DaaS?) is still design, but the core of creativity is in actually building something from the ground up, making something out of the collective imagination of a group of people. Who is doing that here?
Well, it is certainly happening. OTR is a great hub of a lot of really exciting activity. There is a great spirit of makers and builders, I think, due in large part to the physical architecture of the area and driven by folks rehabbing forgotten buildings.
But we still see very little of this “maker movement” happening in the digital space.
I hope to see more digital makers and builders in Cincinnati. Creative product companies instead of creative service companies. We have plenty of design and marketing agencies and very, very few game studios, movie studios or app product studios. Cincinnati is a ghost town for those types of teams.
If we have a great marketing infrastructure in place (which we do) then let’s not forget, as a city, to build things. Let’s get the marketing people to work for digital inventors and makers in our own backyard instead of being the marketing factory for San Francisco and New York.
It’s on us to create that environment. My business partner Jeffrey and I are working on that. We see no reason why original, digital products can’t thrive as a legitimate business here but it is certainly a slog without a supporting community. Many folks have a desire to make original products and they may even have a side project or two but that seems about as far as it goes.
Let’s change that, Cincy.
Quack, the company the original article was about, is doing this very thing right here in Cincy and their product sounds interesting. I’m sure that you can keep up with them at www.brandery.org.
