East Texas, Pure and Similar?

You're a small town in East Texas named Longview. You put out $90,000 to a marketing firm to do a branding study and come up with a new themeline. They settle on: "East Texas: Pure and Simple" to replace the old themeline, "The Best View of the Texas Lake Country."

You proudly announce your new themeline! Then the word starts coming in. Another city already uses that themeline. As does a third city. Ooops. Pretty embarrassing.

But it gets worse. You later find out that one of the cities using the themeline is a client of the marketing firm you hired to do the work! How could they not know? Or did they think nobody would find out? What a disaster. And the marketing firm is NOT in the article about it offering any explanation, so they must not be good at Crisis PR either. Read the article here.

As of this moment, the marketing firm's press release page says nothing about the debacle, although they do proudly display the press release on the branding announcement. Wow. I hope they are working late trying to dig out from this mess.