Jeffrey Barg 
Eagles fans are everywhere.
As I write this on a plane ride home from a trip to Dublin, I can’t help but be impressed with the Irish capital’s self-awareness.
Ireland is known for lots of things—rolling green hills, fiddle playing, Guinness (you can smell the hops from the River Liffey). But perhaps nothing so much as its writers.
So they lean in. Hard. And it works.
Multiple Dublin museums boast first-edition copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses—including the author’s personal copy. You can (and I did) walk into Sweny’s Pharmacy, the shoebox of a shop from Ulysses, which has barely changed since 1904, and get everything from Joyce textual analysis to genealogy factoids to coffee recommendations from the bowtie-clad shopkeeper. The bookstore Hodges Figgis, founded in 1768, has the largest, deepest and most enjoyable selection of any non-specialty bookstore I’ve seen. Our hotel even featured bottles of William Butler Yeats-branded water.
So much of the city is a rolling shrine to Joyce, Yeats, Shaw and Wilde—contemporaries all born in the second half of the 19th century—it’s easy to forget Dublin had 1,000 years of history before any of them were born.
Dublin doesn’t exactly shun that older history (one of my favorite spots was the Long Room in the Library of Trinity College Dublin, with its 200,000 volumes of old books that smell exactly like you hope they would), but it has clearly decided to emphasize that which makes the city unique: its 19th– and 20th-century writers. Even in a country where every street sign appears in both English and Irish, it’s clear the English language rules.
It is, in short, brilliant marketing.
Generalists—whether people, companies, organizations or cities—often have a hard time standing out. We frequently tell clients that being all things to all people doesn’t create a compelling story. Your audiences want to know what you do better than anyone else—that’s what they’ll remember you for, and why they’ll seek out your expertise.
EPIC the Irish Emigration Museum provides a fascinating case study. Most history museums uncover what makes a place special. But while Ireland has a population of roughly 7 million—about the same as its population 200 years ago—up to 80 million people around the world trace their ancestry to the Emerald Isle. So rather than doing what, say, the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History does—celebrating the work of immigrants who came to America—EPIC flips the script and highlights things and people around the world that came from Ireland.
It’s been voted Europe’s leading tourist attraction three years in a row.
Understanding what you’re best at is the first, most crucial step toward telling the best story you can.
It’s a conundrum that Philly grapples with. Are we a city of underdogs or a city of World Series and Super Bowl champions? A city of firsts or a city of bests? Do we have a perennial chip on our shoulders, or do the pope and the DNC like coming here to visit?
Sometimes you have to ask someone else to hold up the mirror. We were shocked at EPIC when the 19-year-old cashier who sold us our tickets, despite never having been to the City of Brotherly Love, saw my wife’s Philly 10K T-shirt and reflexively responded, “Go Birds.”
Some languages are universal.
Posted In Media & Culture