As the official destination marketing organization and visitors bureau of the five boroughs of New York City, NYC & Company faced an unprecedented challenge as we emerged from the pandemic in 2022: restore New York City’s tourism economy to its full potential and exceed pre-pandemic growth. Doing that successfully required us to clarify and develop a new name and visual identity system. Our name was vague, and it didn’t communicate tourism at the very moment the city needed to know we were here. Our visual identity was tied to the City government’s mark, which made it even less clear who we are and what we do. We developed a new name, brand system and strategy to best represent our mission, our purpose and our vision for the future of the organization. Moving forward, we are known as New York City Tourism + Conventions, and now have a cohesive, flexible and distinctive system that is quintessentially NYC, helping the organization to surpass pre-pandemic visitation numbers in the year ahead.
As the effects of the pandemic began to wane, we faced several interrelated challenges that spoke to the need to define our mission more clearly, both for ourselves and stakeholders, and recommit to our organization’s core values. Working with NYC-based design consultancy 2x4, we developed a new name, mark and brand strategy that better represented our organization to the travel industry and consumers: to support New York City’s travel and tourism economy and provide a richer, deeper, more authentic experience of the five boroughs for visitors.
We started at the conceptual level, working to establish our unique value proposition in the market and to settle on a singular vision for our business: to make New York City the most vital, diverse, equitable, exciting, accessible, energetic, vibrant, creative, welcoming city on Earth. From there we revised our mission statement, being precise about our purpose and audiences: to invite the world and energize the City, building equitable, sustainable economic prosperity and community through tourism for the mutual benefit of residents, businesses and visitors. Finally, we began design work, creating a flexible, contiguous system that could reflect the organization’s many consumer-, business- and government-facing programs and initiatives while simultaneously redesigning and relaunching our website, nyctourism.com, the most visible expression of our brand.
Our new brand’s visual identity system is inspired by the graphic heritage of the City as well as the works of artists and designers who themselves were inspired by the five boroughs. The irregular shapes and intersections of the graphic elements and the logo—references to horizontal streets and vertical building shapes—play with contrast, expansion and contraction to reflect the City’s energy. The secondary color palette surveys New York City icons and associations, from Liberty Green, Taxi Yellow and Ferry Orange to Lox Pink, Coffee Cup Blue and Rockaway Sand.
We debuted our new name and brand system in conjunction with a social campaign, #WhatsGoodNYC, harnessing the “opinion power” of NYC’s 8.5 million New Yorkers, offering them a chance to share their points of view on “what’s good” across the City’s five boroughs. Tapping into travelers’ desire for authentic experiences, the foundation of the new branding comes from its genuine, enthusiastic perspectives shared by a diverse mix of locals, highlighting New York City Tourism + Conventions’ role in amplifying these opinions to help travelers experience the best of NYC.
We also launched B2C and B2B print and digital media campaigns to build awareness of our new name and branding. For these, we created a new welcome video to drive leisure visitation, which includes New Yorkers from diverse backgrounds and walks of life sharing what they love about the City, along with another targeted at business event planners. The latter features planners describing why NYC is the ideal destination to host corporate events—a critical sector for us to encourage following the pandemic. The videos capture the essence of “What’s Good” in NYC and have been well received in our events and speaking engagements.
The rebrand campaign has been successful beyond our expectations. The transition from our old brand to the new was relatively seamless, even across social media, where our handles changed, and our new identity has been enthusiastically embraced by our key audiences, partners and stakeholders.
