Predictably, the dynamic folks at Marketing Leeds maintained a dignified silence in response to my e-mail, and after all, who could blame them? How were they to know that Hong Kong had been running a major marketing campaign for two years using the very slogan they had come up with? It’s not as if Jackie Chan, the star of the promotion, was a well-known figure, was it? And when you’ve only got £150,000 to play with, you can’t expect every tiny problem to be sorted out, can you? The business editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post, Nigel Scott, was, in contrast, admirably swift in his reply to me on the copyright issue. Apparently, they haven’t copyrighted “Leeds” but the slogan “Leeds Live it Love it”. I wonder what the Hong Kong equivalent of m’learned friends will think about that?
Incidentally, when I were a lad, the slogan for the Evening Post was “there’s nowt like it at night!” You can imagine the Marketing Leeds suits spluttering into their canapes at that….
Leeds 0, Hong Kong 3 (Chan, hat trick) by Dr Rob Spence is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.