Resident discusses branding opportunities with Nixon City Council

Efforts are under way to help promote new branding for the city of Nixon that capitalizes on the area’s frontier heritage and culture, local volunteer Pablo Aguirre told member of the Nixon City Council during their Monday, Nov. 18 meeting.

Aguirre congratulated the council and city employees, the Lions Club and the Rancho-Nixon Historical Association for improvements being made in the community.

“All of these things that are going on in the community are so noticeable,” Aguirre said. “It's all positive things that are happening. The town is getting cleaned up. The roads are so much improved. You guys are all working towards trying to push our our community forward.

“The Lions Club, they're doing all kinds of things. Donald Hoffman, with the Historic Association, is doing some terrific work around the community that's giving us sort of a brand and it's showing that we are indeed a vibrant community here in this town.”

Aguirre said he has been working on small community projects with several people, including one with Nixon FFA teacher Clarence Bahlmann and another with Steve Pompa of Ascend Promotional Products.

Bahlmann’s students have volunteered to help build a “giant chair” that could be placed by the Aphne Pattillo Nixon Public Library, with the water tower in the background, for photo opportunities.

“It's a fun activity, and it's mostly for photo ops,” Aguirre said. “A giant chair — you'll see them in a lot of different communities that are trying to attract tourism. They are trying to develop their community pride. They're boosting their economic development. They're using their brand.”

Branding is where his project with Pompa comes in and together, they have developed a logo that would have the state of Texas in a rope outline with the words “Legendary Nixon.”

“What I'd like to do is to actually start branding anything that we do from this point forward that is positive for Nixon with that particular logo that says ‘Legendary Nixon,’ falling in lines with what Donald Hoffman and the Historic Association are trying to do to differentiate our community from all the other ones, with all of the history that we have here,” Aguirre said.

“Branding is really important for a really small town. You'll see that in some communities like Gonzales with ‘Come and Take It.’ When you hear that, you hear Gonzales. So what we do is we start using the brand, slowly but surely, and then when they hear ‘Legendary Nixon,’ they'll know that it's us.”

Aguirre said he will be going to different civic organizations in town, including the Lions Club and the American Legion, among others, to encourage them to use the logo and branding to be consistent.

“If we start using them, we think that we will attract tourism and some visitors to our community,” Aguirre said. “Those are the kinds of activities that are attracting tourism and visitors. It's also building another thing called community pride, and I think that's been lacking in Nixon for a long time, but I love what we're starting to see here.

“It's going to boost economic development. It can attract businesses and investors and entrepreneurs hopefully into this community so that we can bring in more business, especially if the business people see us as business friendly, then they would be more likely to come to Nixon and invest in our community.”

Aguirre praised the council and city for putting up a new monument wall next to Dairy Queen at the intersection of Texas 80 and U.S. 87 at the red light.

“We want to differentiate ourselves from other towns,” Aguirre said. “We have a lot of towns that are 30 miles away, everything's relatively close, so we do want to differentiate ourselves from that, and therefore we're going to be more competitive for attracting visitors and businesses and new residents.

“People are moving into our community, so it's good to promote our local businesses. If the businesses have this logo that we can work with, ‘Legendary Nixon,’ maybe they can move their marketing to try to take advantage of that, and it would also help those businesses.

“It's going to preserve our heritage and our culture here in Nixon, celebrating our town heritage while it's drawing interest from outsiders,” Aguirre added. “It’s not going to be easy to build a very strong brand, but it sure is worth it. It's also never too late to start.”
Council members did not make any commitment but appear willing to take Aguirre’s words under advisement.