Level M was awarded a two-year contract to serve as brand strategist for New York City Marketing, under former Mayor Bloomberg.
The initiative recognized that NYC is among the top 10 world brands and that market potential can benefit residents, visitors, and the municipality alike. This was ground-breaking insight at the time and required a holistic brand strategy in order to bring it to life. Level M helped shape the brand blueprint for NYC with the following recommendations:
1. Strengthening the NYC brand means: increasing community engagement with the future of neighborhoods; aligning economic develop with livability and global priorities ('act local, think global' as the old urban planner's saying goes); and innovating private/public partnerships that support the organic assets of place, i.e. culture, architecture, history, blue and green spaces;
2. NYC, understood as a melting pot of human energy, creativity, and dreams, should not be contained by a logo and clever tagline. Leave that to other cities who seek to define themselves vis-à-vis NYC.
3. All future logo marks should creatively be from the street, the cobble stones, born of place, in effect be invisible, leaving the brand-horizon clutter free.
