South Korea’s southern port city Busan has begun work to develop a new city brand that will include replacing the existing slogan and logo for “Dynamic Busan”.
As a result of conducting a preliminary adequacy survey for city brand renewal among 1,000 Busan citizens from November 4 to 10, 71% of those surveyed answered that ‘Busan City needs a new city brand’.
As the city has confirmed the high support of citizens for the city brand change, the city plans to proceed with the brand development work at a speedy pace.
The symbol mark of Busan, enacted on March 9, 1995, and the slogan “Dynamic Busan”, which was enacted on March 11, 2003, that are currently in use do not fully capture the status and dignity of Busan, which has grown into a global city after about 20 years, and the city itself is a single brand.
Accordingly, the city is pushing for a brand reorganization to include Busan’s values, historicity, and future-oriented vision.
In the process of reorganization, sufficient opinions will be collected based on the wide participation of citizens. In particular, the city plans to form a ‘Busan Citizen Participation Group (Brand Sangsang++)’ of 340 people representing 3.4 million Busan citizens to continue close communication from the planning stage.
In addition, it plans to capture the voices of 100,000 citizens through 20 citizen participation events.
In order to develop a city brand with a high degree of perfection for the next 100 years, it will also build and operate an 11-member ‘urban brand expert group (brand imagination multiplied by x)’ that will provide design and marketing insights.
In particular, in the design field, it is planned to select a socially authoritative designer to enhance the design quality of the final Busan city brand design.
“We will do our best to create a new city brand that citizens can trust and empathize with, as well as Busan’s urban philosophy and vision as a global hub city and the aspiration of Busan citizens to host the 2030 Busan World Expo,” said Park Heong-joon, Mayor of Busan.
“We ask for the active participation of citizens so that it can be reborn as a global brand.”
Meanwhile, the city of Busan plans to complete the city brand design reorganization in the first quarter of next year, scheduled for March 2023, in line with the local due diligence of the Busan International Expo Organization (BIE) in the first quarter of next year in order to spread the new unified city brand value at home and abroad.
