What Québec Wants

Advice to Dr. Rapaille as he begins his search for archetypes in Québec City

A follow-up on my previous post about Québec City’s decision to hire Clotaire Rapaille to build its brand.

Québec City’s newspaper Le Soleil reports that Dr. Clotaire Rapaille arrives in town today to begin his branding initiative using his unique approach – which is well document in his book The Culture Code. According to the paper, he will receive $250,000 for this assignment lasting ten weeks – plus another $25,000 for incentives for 330 focus group participants, plus travel and accommodation.

It’s the talk of the town in Québec City. The mayor has had to defend his decision to hire this outsider from the moment it was announced. Le Soleil covers it all including the stormy debate among the city council and the mayor’s visible irritation. The mayor even brought his consultant’s book into the debate yesterday and implored his opponents to read it.

Unsolicited advice:

Dr. Rapaille, forget the formal research – it’s going to be biased anyway given the debate raging about your legitimacy as an expert who can guide Québec City’s destiny.

Here’s an archetype – free of charge: CHAUVINISM

Chauvinism is an exaggerated, bellicose patriotism and a blind belief in national superiority and glory. By extension it has come to include an extreme and unreasoning partisanship on behalf of any group to which one belongs, especially when the partisanship includes malice and hatred towards a rival group.

Try building a brand with that one. Good luck. Bonne chance.

lapresseonmycomputer.ca

It may not last but we like it in Toronto.

It’s our business to stay in touch with Québec. We do so on and offline.

La Presse, North America’s largest French daily (le plus grand quotidien français d’Amérique), is required reading. Until now, we’ve been doing so online at Cyberpresse.ca and via the printed version purchased at a significant premium at our local Indigo store. We happily pay the premium to get the ads. To us, the ads matter as much as La Presse’s editorial content.

That’s why we’re thrilled to now subscribe to lapressesurmonordi.ca to get the full digital version of the day’s paper.

Some are questioning whether this is really the way of the future for the “old” newspapers.

One of the most insightful perspectives I’ve read on the topic is published in today’s issue of the New York Times. Here’s what Frank Rich writes about where this is heading in his Op-ed piece:

One of the freshest commentators on Internet culture, Clay Shirky, has written, correctly, that nobody really knows what form journalism will take in the evolving post-newspaper era. Looking back to the unpredictable social and cultural upheavals brought about by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, he writes, “We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.” So who will do the heavy journalistic lifting? “Whatever works.” Every experiment must be tried, professional and amateur, whether by institutions like The Times or “some 19-year-old kid few of us have heard of.”

Rich quotes Clay Shirky’s. Here’s more of what he has to say:

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

If you wish to read more about Clay Shirky’s views, click here.

Who knows for sure what the future holds?  For now, we’re just glad we can flip through the pages of La Presse’s digital version and check out the ads for Brault & Martineau’s Galerie du sommeil.