We know where you live is a strategy I wrote for Newsday over ten years ago. The saying “Campaigns come and go, but a powerful branding idea is indelible” is the basis of my consulting practice.  We know where you live is a powerful branding idea.

A little background: Newsday serves Long Island, home to about 3 million people  — 7 million if you include Brooklyn and Queens – and it’s the island’s only “local paper.” The New York Daily News, New York Post and New York Times are also options but they more city and nationally focused. What sets Newsday apart is its ability to report the local news. People care about where they live so if you prove to them you can deliver you should command an unfair share of readers’ daily newspaper dollars. No brainer.

The branding idea “We know where you live” is a clear, clean mission. As employees leave the building each night if asked the question “Did you bring readers a closer to understanding their home and hometown today?” they should be able to answer. It is a business-building, strategic mission. Different than “Did you sell more papers today?”

Newsday.com is the newspaper’s online property and like most online brand extensions it is still trying to figure itself out. The executives re-creating it have newspaper hats on and, likely, will not get it right for a while.  Why? Because they don’t have a branding idea to guide them – to free them up as they think through the property. As news, content, commerce, community and widgets are being developed to drive site relevance and traffic, the developers need to be grounded in a strategic mission. The site and paper need to prove that Newsday.com knows where we Long Islanders live. Peace!