Gemeente Zonhoven

City marketing plan

Contact

Kristel Van Mierlo kristel@rca.be

Team

Ivo Clerix
Kristel Van Mierlo
Inne Quetin
Sandy Hendrickx (Copywriter)

Expertises

Let's

A municipality that knows its strengths and is able to play them off, always has a head start. The municipality of Zonhoven also developed a future-oriented city marketing plan with RCA. For this plan, Zonhoven drew up 5 objectives:

  • Giving a better description of Zonhoven’s identity
  • Better playing off the competitor position compared to the surrounding municipalities
  • Preserving and strengthening certain projects, provisions and offers
  • Optimising communication
  • Attracting new sources of employment
 

Create

For the realisation, RCA cooperated closely with a communication working party that had monthly meetings. There was also a steering committee that met up 3 times during the entire project. We also had a total of 35 in-depth interviews with internal people, local participants (privileged witnesses) and important stakeholders. Finally, we surveyed 200 inhabitants by phone. On this basis, we concluded that Zonhoven has lots of quality of life. This idea was therefore central to our positioning.

Impact

RCA specifically incorporated the roll-out of the new positioning of Zonhoven in 10 spearhead projects: 

  • Offering a mix of living
  • Upgrading the centre
  • Optimising the flow of traffic (and dealing with it)
  • Better organising the industrial estate
  • Reinforcing the entrepreneurial climate
  • Attracting the service sector
  • Claiming De Wijers area
  • Better indicating of historic (and natural) attractions
  • Streamlining the range of leisure activities (and event planning)
  • Developing the leisure shop

We also developed a communication plan, a corporate identity handbook and a launch event on 10 October 2010. The launch was widely supported by the population and generated a lot of press attention.