Dunwoody’s Conventions and Visitors Bureau is losing its asterisk.
The bureau is adopting a new logo, eliminating the asterisk-marked design similar to the ones used by the city and the Chamber of Commerce.
A new logo – a lower case letter “d” composed of blue dots – is part of the CVBD’s new marketing plans, Executive Director Katie Bishop said.
The main mission of the CVBD is “to tell the story of Dunwoody for visitors and meetings,” Bishop said.
“We have such a different mission and audience than the chamber or city because we’re dealing with people who may not have ever heard of Dunwoody,” she said. “We’re talking to people outside the community.”
In 2010, the city and CVBD pitched in $105,000 to hire a marketing firm that created three logos intended to give a unified look and feel to the city, CVBD and Chamber of Commerce. But not everyone liked the asterisks that were part of that logo.
And the original tagline, “Smart People, Smart Place,” was the same phrase used by a city in Texas, so Dunwoody switched to “Smart People, Smart City.”
Bob Mullen, director of communications for the city, said the choice to create a new logo and brand for the CVBD came from Bishop and the CVBD’s board of directors. “I feel the new logo creates a vibrancy and energy specific to their mission,” Mullen said.
But the city has no plans to change its logo any time soon, Mullen said.
“The goal and mission of the CVBD is to market Dunwoody as a preferred business, convention and tourist destination,” Mullen said. “It’s not uncommon for a municipal CVBD organization to have a different brand/logo than that of its city—see Atlanta.”
Mullen said city staff members in the past have talked about possible rebranding efforts with members of the City Council budget committee, but city officials decided to stay with what they had.
The CVBD’s process of changing logos evolved naturally, Bishop said, while working on marketing strategies. “Over the years we started to adjust the message to answer the two most common questions we get about Dunwoody: where is it and why Dunwoody,” Bishop said.
Because Dunwoody is only 10 minutes “above” Atlanta, and visitors can have a “beyond delicious meal or experience,” Bishop adopted the tagline “Above and Beyond” for the CVBD.
The mission of the CVBD involves reaching people outside the community, she said. She wants to let meeting planners know, “Hey while you’re here you can ‘go beyond’ with a visit to Spruill gallery or take a walk around the Nature Center,” Bishop said.
“We found it difficult to carry out the message without a new logo,” Bishop said. “We wanted to show how Dunwoody is at center of what’s happening in metro Atlanta.”
“The ‘d’ mark is contemporary in design, but the font is traditional because that’s what we are, at the heart of our community,” Bishop said.
When the CVBD Board voted August 6, 2014, they wanted to determine if the creative agency could come up with a logo that tied into the “above and beyond” theme, Bishop said. “It was more of an exploratory process, and the CVBD wasn’t committed to changing its logo,” she added.
By December they had several designs and held focus groups with community leaders, meeting planners and members of their target group.
Bishop said the social media logo changes were made the first week of March and printed advertising materials should be completed by May for distribution at welcome centers in time for summer traffic. In July, the CVBD plans to unveil a new website as part of its digital campaign.
“The whole process happened really organically,” she said.
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