When people ask me what it is about Seattle that makes me love it so, I always have the same answer. It’s a vibrant, diverse city that’s close to big nature. You can stand at Pike Place Market and, weather permitting, see Mount Rainier. Hell, you can stand in my bathtub, and, weather permitting, see Mount Rainier.
Seattle’s new buzzword cashes in on that aesthetic. Apparently, we’re “metronatural.” I’m sure the sensibility behind my response was shared by whoever they asked, or certainly by the agency that got 200k to come up with that term. I get it. I also think it’s kind of, well, stupid.
The city spent 200k to tell tourists why to come here. But all you have to do is stand in my bathtub to know that this is a fine city. (Okay, that’s not going to work as a marketing campaign. But you reallly can see Mount Rainier from my bathtub.) If you go downtown on any day, the city is chockablock with conventioneers and sightseers. We have a pretty waterfront city with great eats, famous coffee culture, cool gold rush history… does your city have totem poles? And we’re close to orcas, majestic peaks, Canada, eh, the rain forest…does your city go from urban to wild in an hour? So I question spending all that dough when the word “Seattle” is evocative enough to keep the rolling suitcases rolling in.
I’m a big fan of plain English. Metronatural smacks of jargon and packaging. There’s a lot of this around the city these days and it gets up my nose. I confess, I’ve built up some “I was here first” attitude over the past decade plus. I wasn’t here first, that’s crap. As proof of the lateness of my arrival, you could buy “Grunge is Dead” t-shirts the year I moved to Seattle. But I still lament the packaging and marketing of our Seattle lifestyle as a product.
I don’t know why this bugs me so much. Maybe I don’t like being shoehorned in to a cliche. Maybe I don’t like being forced to admit that I’m a cliche at all. Maybe I wish the city had spent the 200k on education or social services or oh, I don’t know, some bleeding heart lefty cause, of course. Maybe it’s that I’m in hard core denial of the growth and change that the city has experienced since I’ve moved here.
My best pal and I used to share a lowrise duplex apartment next to a crappy old supermarket. Developers bought the supermarket and mowed it down. They put in a monster condo complex and called it the Braeburn – a type of apple – as an insider joke, I think – the supermarket was The Red Apple. The Braeburn marketed our neighborhood’s lifestyle as something you could buy when you handed over 400k to buy a unit in this flashy new complex. Along with your fancy stainless steel fridge, it appeared you could also purchase our “boho post-grunge hippie with a real job yeah I went to art school but man, I gotta eat too” way of life.
When I heard the term “metronatural” on the news last night, I got it, right away. It’s probably not as stupid as I’m saying it is – if I wasn’t already here, I’d totally be the target market for that campaign. “Wow! A real city with actual nature! I am SO there! I’m putting on GoreTex, getting in the Jetta and going hiking, and I’ll be back in town with plenty of time to get martinis before I go see Beck!”
I had a boyfriend once who kept telling me how “cool” I was. It was supposed to be a compliment, but I hated it. This feels the same to me. “Quit trying to define me, man!”
“Dude, you are so Metronatural.”
Meh.
[tags]Seattle, metronatural[/tags]
Aw, jeez…I’m so behind! Are you back on the Left Coast?! (I’ll keep reading until I get to where I left off, of course.) Not sure how I feel about “metronatural”…although I, too, get it. (Wonder how they’d label PDX…)
Welcome back to Seattle! It’s funny that the city would coin a phrase to bring people here when most of the Seattle-ites I know want to scare people off with talk of rain and darkness… maybe “metropluvial” is the way they would describe it?
Nice distractions … housework done though.
Hey, you should run for office. I’m all worked up about the state of America under Bush, if moving countries wasn’t such a pain in a ass, I’d move there just to run your campaign … well the bits that didn’t require a natural born expert etc.
Metro … but it’s all the rage now darling.
Lol, first time I’ve heard it applied to a city … seems kind of sissy 😉 writes the kiwi.
This morning’s PI had some alternatives suggested by readers. My favorite was “Left of Bellevue”. Dilbert was correct: Marketers really do have a three drink minimum, don’t they?
Apparently, the money that was used to generate this was not public money, but private money. The convention and visitors bureau is private, so you can relax about government being involved. Metronatural is easy to get and you are right, it probably irritates us because we don’t want others to catch on. Unfortunately, living here for 43 years, I have seen people catching on at an unusually fast rate as of late.
J
I’m REALLY glad to learn it wasn’t city money. That’s good news. And what you said, SoWrite.
Here is a video including an interview with the designer who first thought of “metronatural”.
http://peoplegeek.wordpress.com/2006/12/16/seattle-straight-but-very-gay-acting-2/
Enjoy!