Kylik Kisoun Taylor of Tundra North Tours provided the boldest recommendation during a planning meeting for the 2018 Inuvik Sunrise Festival: change the date, away from the actual time the sun rises.
As heretical as that may sound, his argument had merit.
Typically, the festival is held at the end of the first week in January, when the sun rises again for the first time in Inuvik after the dark polar winter.
Taylor suggested either pushing the festival up and making it a New Year’s celebration or moving it back to February when it’s brighter out.
The challenge with the current date, he explained, is that most people can’t justify taking a third week off from work after the standard Christmas break. It’s a poor time of the year to attract tourism and truly, the weather’s not that pleasant.
When people come to Inuvik, they actually want to be able to do stuff. As novel as the first sunrise is, tourists want it to be light enough out to engage in Northern activities and see the area.
The debate exemplified the challenge any business or organization can run into when picking a name.
The festival is named after the sunrise, so it has to happen during the first sunrise, right?
Well, no. What’s a name? It’s just words. It wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t perfectly in line with its namesake. That or scale the sunrise festival way back to a community event and use those resources for a differently named tourist attraction in February.
The whole concept goes out the window if it’s cloudy anyway.
Imagine the tourists who spend thousands of dollars coming up here turning around because of such a semantic issue.
“Hmm, I really want to go to Inuvik for the sunrise festival, but did you know the actual sunrise was a month before? Scrap the plans – I cannot play accomplice to this!”
If you’ve got a business called the Red Shirt Company, but people are beating down the doors for blue shirts, you can either die waving that red flag or start making blue shirts.
A common mistake in business is getting too attached to a concept.
You start a new company with this incredible vision wherein everything ties back to Concept X. It’s a work of art how all aspects of the business centre around this one idea.
But a year in, you start finding out that people prefer a service that doesn’t tie to that concept. If you want to grow, forget your personal pride and follow the market.
A rigid vision sounds beautiful on paper but can become a ball and chain around your neck.
What matters is the product, not the concept, name or vision.
If moving the sunrise festival to a different date brings more money into town, that’s worth any nitpicking about the name.