Everyone knows that the city of Detroit has seen better days.  I've heard a number of people say that we Michiganders do some of the worst damage to the national reputation of the city.  In spite of this, there are a lot of people working very hard to turn the city around and return it to a thriving metropolis.  But it's a slow process. 

One of the best examples of this is the election for the interim Detroit mayor, a vacancy created by the resignation of former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick after his text message/purgery scandal.  I really wouldn't have been surprised if either of the candidates, Ken Cockrel, Jr. or Dave Bing, would have won.  It turned out that Dave Bing pulled out a come from behind lead on election day.  But what did surprise me is that only 15 percent of registered voters turned out to vote.  What that says to me is that the voters of Detroit are weary (to borrow the title of a song from Sufjan Stevens, a Michigan native).  They're tired of politics.  And that might be what won the election for Dave Bing.  He's not a politician.  I live in Ann Arbor so I'm not right up in the middle of the Detroit scene but I only saw one campaign ad during the campaign.  I think it was on freep.com and it was one put out by the Cockrel campaign attacking Dave Bing for something, I think it was for being an outsider.  When I heard that only 15% of registered voters turned out, my first thought was "Well, they didn't do very good marketing."  Maybe it's the economy and budgets are tight, maybe it's that it was an interim election, but it seemed like we didn't hear very much about it. 

Just today, I opened up our copy of Crain's and saw an article about how Dave Bing won the election because of the "brand" that he built for himself.  The Cockrel campaign's biggest criticisms of Bing were that he was an outsider and was in with big business.  But Bing's campaign was able to turn those around and brand himself as someone who wasn't linked to any of the negative things about politics in recent years and who would think about running the city like he would run a business.  When we are working with our clients to develop a strong brand we ask ourselves is it "true from the inside out"?  If a brand doesn't represent who you really are, it won't be effective.   I hope for the sake of Detroit, and our state, that the Dave Bing brand is one that is true from the inside out.