The Houghton Planning Commission listens to a presentation Tuesday on creating a rebranding and marketing plan for the city. The commission named four members to a committee created to help develop the plan. Garrett Neese/Daily Mining Gazette

HOUGHTON — Houghton will look at creating a rebranding and marketing plan for the city.

The Houghton Planning Commission voted to create a committee to discuss a rebranding and marketing plan at its meeting Tuesday.

City Manager Eric Waara, Chair Tom Merz, and Commissioners Ben Ciavola and Dan Liebau were named to the committee. Other community members will also be added.

Marketing Department Karyn Olsson spoke about the importance of the plan, and what the process could look like. Olsson also sits on the city’s Downtown Development Authority.

Olsson said a marketing plan would draw on priorities outlined by the city in its master plan, such as placemaking. The branding would be the marketing activities the city does that shows how the city wants to be perceived.

“I’ve got a long history of the city here — I think there’s three logos, five taglines, the banner’s in one color, the website’s in another color,” Olsson said. “All that stuff is really critical … There’s a lot of the energy that’s been created with the marketing that’s been created in the past five years. It just needs to be tightened up a little bit.”

Olsson said the city would first need to focus on what the brand needs to accomplish for the city.

A good marketing and branding position can boost community pride and also help attract new residents, talent and visitors, Olsson said. It could also help the city with Michigan Economic Development Corp., which has provided funding for past city projects.

Olsson also laid out a five-step process for the city to follow, which she said would be driven by the Planning Commission or City Council. After setting a goal, the city would hold community engagement sessions to determine needs and priorities.

“That engagement piece is critical and personal,” Olsson said. “And that’s what you want it to be with the community. So I think first and foremost, you’ve got to really define what you want your marketing to accomplish and what you want your brand to accomplish before you can do anything.”

From there, the city would develop a brand strategy and visual elements, which they would continue tweaking by looking at resident feedback and other metrics such as employment rates and commercial property occupancy rates.

“Anybody that has been through marketing or branding before, if they’re doing a great job, they go through this process,” Olsson said. “Whether it’s a company or a university or a municipality, that process is gonna look exactly the same as like that for a reason.”

Waara said the city would likely use Olsson as a facilitator in the early steps before bringing in a larger company to assist with strategy and further stages.

No deadlines were set. Waara said the committee would likely need to take a deeper look at what it hopes to accomplish.

“Some of the past efforts were maybe more marketing than branding, and logo design versus branding,” he said. “That’s what those efforts were, and those were somewhat hurried … we might need a couple of committee meetings under our belt to look at the scale of or the distance we’re looking at going.”

Also Tuesday, the commission reformed its Zoning Ordinance Committee, which had met after the city’s previous master plan to look at places the ordinance needed to be updated. Vice Chair Bill Leder said the changes could include reworking the chapter on stormwater ordinance to add more clarity, or adding a minimum scope for site plan reviews that would allow smaller projects to be approved administratively rather than at the planning commission level.

Waara, Leder and Commissioner Kristine Bradof will continue on the committee, along with Commissioner Norma Veurink.