Scotch egg on face
It is good to realise that great minds think alike because when The Mole read about Scotland’s startling revelation about their new marketing slogan, “Welcome to Scotland”, The Mole thought, well now isn’t that ingenious and so it appears did Susan Kurosawa of the Australian who said: –
Tourism slogans are funny old things but Departure Lounge is much amused (and simultaneously appalled) by Tourism Scotland’s latest effort.
After enlisting Scotland’s top advertising brains and spending the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars, the tartan bureaucracy has come up with … wait for it: Welcome to Scotland.
The slogan will replace airport signs proclaiming Scotland to be “the best small country in the world” (so there, Vatican City, Monaco, Nauru and co). That junked slogan, to Lounge’s mind, may smack of cringe but is several steps ahead of other new grab-phrases that are apparently part of a signboard sweep of Scottish towns and regions, including Home of Europe’s Fastest Growing Life Sciences Community.
Unsurprisingly, the Conservative Opposition has gone on the attack. Gavin Brown, the Opposition enterprise spokesman, has said: “Next, (First Minister) Alex Salmond will be telling us this is the best small slogan in the world.”
After many years of traipsing the globe and peering through her glasses in disbelief at posters and signs proclaiming Jewel of the East (or west, north or south, depending where one is standing at the time), Lounge’s favourite slogan remains the one she encountered in the southern Indian city of Mysore about 20 years ago. “If this is your first visit to our city,” it read, “you are most welcome to it.”
At least there is a lovely logic at play there, unlike in the US state of Washington. Tourism consultants fattened their wallets there with SayWA (pronounced wahhh), until a public outcry demanded Washington State Tourism pull it.
Please don’t anyone tell Western Australia there’s an as-new slogan going cheap.
Go Susan!
A report by The Mole and the Australian
John Alwyn-Jones
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