The Chinese interest in American brands, we hope, will help preserve a few. They even rescued Hummer, one not-so-old brand that even I, lover of old brands, would rescue.

But one good thing; it is China that helped save Buick. The success of Buick in China was so important that if the brand died in the U.S., the Chinese would not think the brand credible, if no longer sold in the U.S. So while some sub brands of Buick like the Buick Skylark did not survive, at least the brand did.

The Chinese consider old brands a treasure of the nation; this is a very sophisticated notion, and one that Americans will have to adopt if we are going to survive in a world of open trade. Often, a trade name or brand is the only real protection we have when everything is a commodity.

We ran across a story on the Chinese Ministry of Culture web page. We repeat a bit of the post, though we added some commentary in parentheses:

The old brand was not only a witness to history and culture but also a treasure of the Chinese nation. According to statistics there were 16,000 old brand stores in China in 1949, in such varied industries as catering, medicine, food, retail, tobacco, alcohol and garments. Due to a multitude of reasons (ahem, like a Communist revolution!), many old brands went into bankruptcy one after the other. Since 1990, the number has shrunk to 1,600, just 10 percent of 1949′s number.

The government’s Ministry of Culture is hoping many of the brands can return to Qianmen Street.

According to the Zhang Jian, vice secretary-general of the committee of Chinese old brands, the focus of the controversy is that some local departments and businessmen haven’t realized the importance of the old brands and the role they play towards invigorating the national economy and the passing down of business culture.

Zhang Jiang appealed that the founders of Qianmen Street could put their attention on tourism profits, because old brands can reproduce the ancient street feel of Qianmen and their potential value would go far beyond the revenue of such corporations and local government.

There is a strong effort to protect brand names in China; we heard about Tangjinu, an online shop that carries nostalgic cosmetics, which is owned by Jiang Yafang. Some brands that were mentioned in the article include Miracle beauty cream, Friendship snow cream, Golden Ballet perfume and Seal clamshell oil.

Of course, the creation of a committee to protect old brands would never fly in the United States; we just aren’t that sort of place. But the issue does point up the need for people who work in economic development and tourism to begin to consider the value of older American brand names.

To consider:

• Two instances that are important to the United Kingdom have not received attention as issues of economic development and tourism. The issues are the proposed shuttering of the Johnny Walker distillery in Kilmarnock, Scotland and the proposed sale of Cadbury to Kraft. Both threaten the identity of Britain, and its tourist appeal.
• Cuban brands are key to Cuban identity; ditto with Bermuda brands like Barritt’s.
• Chicago tourism officials where NOWHERE on the issue of the change of the name Marshall Field’s to Macy’s. These sorts of issues are critical to tourism development, but visitor bureau folks are often ignorant of these issues. Macy’s wasted millions in brand goodwill when it shut down old brands across the U.S., and business leaders, advertising gurus and other retailers and manufacturers hardly raised a peep.
• The shutdown of factories across the U.S. has meant the closing of many factory tours, too many to mention.
• In the 1930s, old brands and shops in Colonial Williamsburg were preserved and revived. This made for a tourism and economic development bonanza that helped save the economy of Virginia’s Peninsula.

We got a great idea today from Israel tourism. It’s called Dinner in the Sky. The idea is simple. You build a platform, make a crane, serve folks from dinner and hoist them up in the sky. It’s called Dinner in the Sky.

Certainly, it isn’t as snazzy as the rotating dining room atop the Hyatt in Atlanta, but it is a great way to give some excitement to your town. And to have it atop cities like Tel Aviv makes those sorts of fun places even more exciting.

The platform seats up to 22 guests with three staff. Each menu is catered by Israeli chef Frank Azulay and features foie gras rolls, lamb ribs and cherry pie.

“We are thrilled to now offer this one-of-a-kind dining experience to travelers to Israel,” says Arie Sommer, Commissioner of Tourism, North and South America, in a press release. “And with Israel being an up-and-coming gourmand destination, Dinner in the Sky will serve as the perfect addition to our culinary repertoire.”

Many tourism officials are boring. They get lazy, and don’t think up stuff to create excitement in their town. Somehow, they mistakenly believe that it is their duty to “brand” their city with some ads, and hope the tourists come. But what happens if you don’t have enough attractions. Or the attractions have gone stale?

You’ve got to think up some wacky stuff to attract the tourists. And then send out some press releases.

I am reading about neuromarketing, the science of looking at brains and connecting it with consumer behavior, after seeing that 60 Minutes clip on computers reading brains (thanks to Jon Vanhala for sending it out). I wanted to find out more about neuromarketing to get a sense of how prevalent it is. I ended up stumbling onto Roger Dooley’s Neuromarketing Blog.

His thesis is this. We think differently about things when we hear stories about them. He says that if someone hands you an old brick, it’s an old brick. But if they tell you its from Mount Vernon then WHOA! Your brain does something different. It begins to think of more things, and the brick becomes special. That’s why brands work. You connect a word to a commodity, and it becomes special. That’s why I like brands with good stories, and why I believe that brands need to tell stories.

And that’s why stories and history about places help to sell a destination. History, frankly, is the only thing that can sell a destination. And it is the only thing that can sell a product. It doesn’t have to be a long history, as even a short good history will sell something. But the history has to be there.

Growing up in Virginia, that history is always around, in furniture, buildings, even the landscape. And as a Virginian (indeed any old school culture though), you are sort of trained to think of everything with a narrative.

But back to Roger Dooley:

When we choose a place for our business or to live, a sense of place and history is often neglected despite the considerable impact they can have on us emotionally. Whether it is as simple as a historic home or as elaborate as Chicago’s Tribune Tower, being in a location with a sense of history can profoundly affect our mood and that of the people with whom we interact.

Does your place of business have a story to tell? What about an object in it? And what about your customers – do they perceive your business as a manufactured environment, or one that comes with historic substance?

Coke, Brooks Brothers and the like are powerful brands because they have history behind them. London is a powerful city because of its history. That doesn’t mean that just because a brand or a place has history, it can’t screw itself up. But when Coke screwed up its marketing, it wasn’t the fault of the history. Ditto with New York; when the city was broke, it wasn’t the history’s fault. But to succeed, it needed the history to cement its place in the world.

When brands and cities pretend there is no history, they soon will get forgotten by it.

We found the rather spectacular website Artificial Owl with some hauntingly beautiful photos of Detroit’s empty Union Station. The site is all about photos of abandoned places.

I cannot help but think of the parallels between Detroit’s waste of this great building, and the waste that is the American automobile industry. It is telling that this happened at exactly the same time as General Motors was running itself into the ground, and wasting car brands like Buick, Chevrolet and Pontiac.

If Detroit is to survive, it better care of these assets as now it has little else. A great video of the station is here on YouTube. were we see what it looked like as late as the 1980s. It was renovated partially, and then allowed to rot.

But that is the story of the inept leadership of the city of Detroit. Pity. It is pretty close to criminal.

By the way, if you like sites like Artificial Owl, you will certainly like the blog Labelscar; that site that documents dead malls and dying retailers.

Amusing that Kaine is in the governor’s office now as his father-in-law, Gov. Linwood Holton, helped push the campaign through. Holton is the politician most associated with it, though it came from the Martin & Woltz agency.

The genius of the campaign was that it was racy for its time. Virginia Tourism’s Alisa Bailey says on their Youtube video that the slogan is “often misunderstood” and that it was initially for lovers of different things. That may well be true, but the reason why folks loved it was because it was modern, and not really about history. It hinted at free sex. Nah, it promised it. Yes, it was smart. But mostly, it indicated that if you came to Virginia, you could get some, and Virginia was in the 1960s thought of as being a state where you were least likely to get action.

I think I recall some bosom in the television commercials, but I could be confusing it with that 1970s Sheraton commercial with the hot woman coming out of the water in a tight shot of a tightly fitted wet bathing suit. On this page, one of the first print ads from the Adweek Adfreak blog.

A bit from the official history:

The idea came from a creative team headed by George Woltz of Martin & Woltz Inc., a Richmond-based advertising agency. According to Martin, a $100-a-week copywriter named Robin McLaughlin came up with an advertising concept that read, “Virginia is for history lovers.” For a beach-oriented ad, the headline would have read, “Virginia is for beach lovers,” for a mountains ad, “Virginia is for mountain lovers,” and so on.

Martin thought the approach might be too limiting. Woltz agreed, and the agency dropped the modifier and made it simply “Virginia is for Lovers.” The idea was that whatever people love most in a vacation, whatever they are most passionate about, Virginia was the ideal destination.

Virginia is for Lovers was considered bold and provocative, but it was also just plain smart from a marketing perspective. It planted a seed – a new image of a more exciting Virginia.

In Bailey’s YouTube interview, she mentions that they are really targeting Baby Boomers with the new campaign. Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but we do think that the state might be best to sell the state first to 20 year olds; as we have learned with Facebook, Boomers slavishly follow youth. And we are not ones to want so much sex in everything (and we hate “edgy”), but if you are going to do Virginia is for Lovers as a slogan, it needs to have some breast!

Another thing we don’t understand. We know that you have to bid out your advertising, but we wonder why Dave Martin’s Brandsync and/or his former agency The Martin Agency are not working on the campaign. It would be as if you hired out Mickey Mouse’s 50th anniversary to Warner Brothers.

Most people don’t remember that the state ditched the campaign in the 1980s, and then brought it back. I wish I could recall what the interim slogan was, but Virginia Is For Lovers was totally de-emphasized, only to be brought back with a new version of the song by Robbin Thompson.

Today, the slogan functions much like Maxwell House’s “Good to the Last Drop” where it is a master slogan with a secondary slogan attached to it. The new second slogan is “Live Passionately” and we don’t think of Virginia as a passionate brand; that’s like Venice or Paris.

We wish they would make the original commercials easily available online.

If you want a Virginia is for Lovers T-shirt, please don’t be too disappointed by the horrid looking Virginia is For Lovers licensed merchandise store. It’s an ugly website, wretched and uninteresting. Virginia Tourism did an RFP fairly recently on it, and I was hoping they would do better in licensing the brand. It looks more like an unlicensed site. And we wonder what good it is that the state of Virginia is charging $1 for bumperstickers? The old idea was that they gave them away like crazy, by the thousands, at visitor centers so kids would put them on the back of parents’ cars and do some free advertising. I know Virginia has a $2 billion deficit but they really ought to give them away.

Oh, and please do visit Virginia and their website Virginia.org. We have it on some good authority that you CAN actually get some action there.