Eureka Mayor Susan Seaman, Police Chief Steve Watson and Councilmember Kim Bergel pose in their Eureka-branded masks in front of city hall’s new banner

Just over a year after the City of Eureka awarded a $370,000 marketing contract to Virginia-based company Eddy Alexander, a few dozen city officials and citizens gathered in the Eureka City Hall parking lot to witness the unfurling of a fresh, three-story orange banner signaling the launch of the of the city’s new “Resilient” period.

The unveiling is the beginning of the city’s latest campaign to encourage tourists to seek out their own Eureka moments. To better grasp which aspects of Eureka were selected for promotion, click on over to ResilientEureka.com and/or feast your eyes on the slick clip below.

(Also: see LoCO‘s Eureka brand launch report from last week for more on all the twists and turns that got us to this point.) 

Watch the banner drop in the clip below:


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You can read an Eddy Alexander-produced press release on Eureka’s new brand launch below:

The City of Eureka has unveiled their new brand strategy and visual identity. In a virtual launch event, they released a new brand teaser video, social media filters, and a comprehensive brand book that features the city’s communications strategy, visual identity building blocks, and examples of ads and merchandise.

They are asking the community to visit www.resilienteureka.com to learn more about the project and to discover several fun ways to engage with the new logo, color palette, and brand elements.
The City’s Agency of Record, Eddy Alexander, led the community through an 11-month process which included 3,450 completed community surveys, hundreds of one-on-one interviews, 12 focus groups, and a community-wide photo contest which all helped shape the messaging, positioning, and style of the new brand. The final designs reflect the complex and heavily layered dynamics of the city’s calm, coastal environment, vibrant, historic setting, and its diverse, artistic, and independent people. The brand was heavily influenced by Humboldt County’s natural beauty, outdoor recreation, and the City of Eureka’s architecture, history, and public art scene.

“This project was originally designed to help our citizens celebrate the best of what we have to offer and to encourage all of our citizens to start visualizing our future and working towards what is possible in the years ahead,” Acting City Manager Pam Powell said. “Although no one could have predicted the pandemic, the original objectives of this project — to encourage our citizens in their placemaking efforts, and to stimulate the local economy — have never been more critical than they are now. We are delighted with how this project has evolved. Eddy Alexander has led our community through a very collaborative process and has found several creative ways to demonstrate their understanding of what makes our community unique. The result is beautiful, professional, authentic, and aspirational. We just love how it turned out.”

“Eureka’s branding materials demonstrate a vibrancy that I have recognized in our community for years, but we haven’t seemed to capture when we communicate about it,” Mayor Susan Seaman said. “The exciting thing about our brand is all of the very not-exciting work that went in to create it. Eddy Alexander came in with a fresh perspective and truly let the community interviews and the data, and there were a lot of interviews and data, go into its creation.” 

The brand guidebook, which anchors the launch, includes details on how each of the visual and verbal elements work together to tell Eureka’s story. It highlights when and how each element should be leveraged and provides simple tips to avoid application error. By using one common professional system to identify and promote the City, the community is hoping to build brand equity, increase attention on important messages, and drive synergistic benefit. Through this effort, the city is seeking to align communication efforts to better support investments in economic development, quality of life offerings, infrastructure advancement, and tourism. 

“As this brand was developed, we were thinking about all the ways it could be used moving forward. It was important to us to capture many of the key attributes that both existing citizens and repeat visitors associate with the city,” Eddy Alexander President Jennifer Eddy said. “There is rich tradition and history here, we wanted to celebrate that while also finding a way to use it to frame all of the modern creativity and transformation efforts that are happening as well.”

“We spent a lot of time talking about the vibe in Eureka, the feeling people get when they surrounded by art, culture, tradition, history, and interesting people and places,” Eddy Alexander Community Coordinator Emily Kirsch said. “This has been such a neat opportunity to explore everything the city has to offer, and to get to know the people who make it as great as it is.”

A relaunch of visiteureka.com is also a part of Eureka’s brand launch. The website is designed to make Eureka more accessible to both visitors and local citizens. The new site includes information on History & Architecture, Outdoor Recreation, Food & Drink and much more and will update in time for this weekend’s opening of hotels.

In addition to all of the online elements, the launch added several newly branded graphics to the community skyline. City Hall now features a three-story banner which displays the city’s new logo and there are two newly restored billboards along the 101 that direct both north and southbound traffic to the waterfront and historic old town shopping and dining district.

The brand release also comes with new Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat frames and filters that represent the new brand. Citizens are encouraged to change their profile pictures and add stories to participate in the community celebration in coordination with this project launch. Families can also partake in a local Snapchat challenge by visiting local icons and favorite spots around the city to hunt for hidden snapchat filters that are geo-tagged to iconic local locations. Those that participate are encouraged to upload their snaps and to use the hashtag #ResilientEureka and #VisitEureka.
Moving forward, tagging photos with #visiteureka will also a provide an opportunity for your photos to be shared in a curated and continuously updating public gallery on Visiteureka.com as well.

“Now comes the fun part. The community helped start the process and it is always up to the community to help define a brand’s full potential,” Eddy Alexander Tourism and Destination Practice General Manager Bob Gilbert said.

“We hope that once everyone has a chance to see the new brand that they will use the landing page provide input. The way things are going, it won’t be long before we’re promoting the city to travelers, but right now we really want the community to just have a chance to get familiar with the new materials and to start thinking about how they can all be used to tell local stories. It’s always the stories that travelers take home and share.”

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