New York™. A city as a brand cosmos?

The outcome of the Democratic primary election in New York City was a thunderclap: "The Mamdani earthquake" (The New York Times). The presumed frontrunner – equipped with a well-known name, extensive administrative experience, considerable financial resources, and open support from established power elites – lost, and lost clearly. For many observers, this election was not merely a choice between individuals, but a decision about political styles, generations, visibility, and legitimacy. Once again, The New York Times, always adept at semantic compression, summed up the result in a single, telling sentence: "The Cuomo brand seems to have lost its shine."

What may seem like a casual formulation here – brand erosion as an expression of political weakness – actually points to a deeper scenario: What if brand logic were to become a prerequisite for public resonance? What if political programs, positions, or social anchoring no longer tipped the scales, but recognizability, affect modulation, and semantic consistency did? What if political legitimacy were no longer argued for, but measured as symbolic brand value?

For this question, New York City is the perfect case study. No other city has so consistently developed the conditions for a symbolically coded public sphere: a media-saturated, densely populated, globalized arena in which political relevance is increasingly negotiated through visibility, style, and brandability. In this city, an election result can be read as a shift in meaning, and the loss of political authority as a fading brand. Here, one can observe how politics meets aesthetics, the social encounters the symbolic, and democracy collides with market dynamics – not as a finished development, but as an urban testing ground for new symbolic orders. This is about politics, publicness, and the symbolic logic of branding – as played out in an urban scenario.

The origin of this urban regime of meaning lies in a double crisis: material and symbolic. By the late 1970s, New York was fiscally bankrupt, socially fragmented, and stigmatized in the media. The city government's response was not just fiscal but also semantic. With the 1977 I ❤ NY campaign, a new framework of meaning was created. The city no longer presented itself as a problem case but as an emotional promise. Love for the city became the brand itself. And with it came a paradigm shift: from material to symbolic urban production, from planning to communication, from urban management to brand maintenance.

Yet, as Miriam Greenberg showed in her book Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (2008), this transformation was neither centrally orchestrated nor free of contradictions. Rather, the 1970s and 1980s saw various competing visions for New York City's future – backed by a wide range of interest groups: city government, tourism industry, real estate sector, cultural initiatives, labor unions, community activists. The official I ❤ NY campaign was only the most visible surface of a deeper symbolic-political negotiation process. Branding meant not just marketing, but conflict resolution through aesthetic means. That a certain consumable, resilience-based version of New York ultimately prevailed was by no means inevitable – it was the result of symbolic dominance.

Since then, the New York brand has unfolded in many directions. Today, the city is a textbook case of what Hellmann & Pichler (2005) call the "expansion of the brand zone" – extending into nearly all areas of society: economy, culture, politics, tourism, everyday life. It is no longer static or unambiguous, but contradictory, flexible, adaptable. It embodies both globality and locality, elite culture and subculture, financial capitalism and creative resistance. Neighborhoods like SoHo or DUMBO, names like MoMA or Wall Street, figures like Warhol or AOC – all draw from the city's brand core while simultaneously contributing to its ongoing re-coding. New York is thus not just a place but a resonance chamber, a surplus of meaning, an urban interface onto which global notions of urbanity, freedom, speed, contradiction, and possibility are projected.

In such a context, political actors no longer operate independently of branding but as part of its architecture. Rudy Giuliani turned order into a brand. Michael Bloomberg managed New York like a publicly traded company. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents a new political signature: radical yet brand-conscious – with strong imagery, clear messaging, and global connectivity.

The Cuomo brand, by contrast, feels like the afterglow of an exhausted symbol. And yet, it was once strong. It originated from a political dynasty: Mario Cuomo, Governor from 1983 to 1994, was known as an intellectually inclined Democrat with rhetorical finesse and moral gravitas. His son Andrew Cuomo continued that legacy – with a blend of pragmatism, assertiveness, and media-savvy instincts. During the Covid pandemic, he was omnipresent: as crisis manager, voice of authority, seemingly rational counterweight to federal-level chaos. The brand stood for stability, leadership, classic statehood – a particular understanding of trust in politics.

But like many political brands, this one was built on a carefully curated narrative. When allegations of sexual misconduct and authoritarian leadership style emerged, the image faltered. His resignation was not just an institutional but a semantic event. The story the brand relied on lost credibility. What once appeared statesmanlike now seemed self-important. The recent election outcome confirms this symbolic erosion: the Cuomo brand not only lost votes but forfeited its cultural resonance.

In contrast stands the winner of the recent primary: Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, child of Ugandan-Indian immigrants, rapper, tenant rights activist, and state assembly member from Queens. At first glance, Mamdani seems to defy everything associated with conventional political branding. He openly identifies as an opponent of neoliberal urban development and critic of politics as an image business. He speaks of expropriation, collective solutions, democratic participation – not optimization, efficiency, or spectacle. Substantively, he challenges the core logic of political branding.

And yet: Mamdani does not act outside this logic, but within it – and against it at the same time. He refuses classical branding without ignoring the conditions of urban visibility. His presence on social media is consistent, his messages are clear and ideologically coherent. He offers no glossy aesthetics, but unmistakable stance. He does not speak as a brand – but he speaks in a media-effective way. Zohran Mamdani is not a product of political brand construction, but an actor who skillfully navigates its mechanisms.

The contrast could hardly be clearer: on one side, a brand whose glow faded from overexposure and complacency – on the other, a new signature whose strength lies in freshness, adaptability, and open-ended meaning. One points to a city that has long asserted its resilience – the other to a city seeking to reinvent itself. What emerges here is more than a change of names: it marks a shift in political horizons. A constructed, hopeful horizon of expectation has, for the moment, displaced a familiar realm of experience. An open future seems – at least for now – more politically resonant than a well-worn past.

Did brand logic truly shape voting behavior in this election? Did consumers or citizens make the choice? Was the deciding factor the persuasive power of the program – or the more effective brand communication? A strict dichotomy is misleading. More likely, this election represents a hybrid moment: a fluid overlap of classic political contestation and symbolic brand competition. In a city once again asserting its exceptionalism.

New York thus stands as a prototype for a possible future of urban politics – not as an exportable model, but as a concentrated possibility space where new forms of symbolic power can be observed. Visibility becomes currency, media connectivity a prerequisite for relevance, symbolic consistency a condition for political efficacy. These dynamics converge with particular intensity in New York – not because the city is typical, but because it is extreme: hyper-mediated, globally networked, economically contested, culturally overcoded. The city remains the exception – with exemplary resonance. And the city emits a strong weak signal: strong because it makes visible what elsewhere remains latent. It shows how deeply brand logic can infiltrate urban politics – and how fragile democratic publics become when resonance is the condition of participation.

Our modest proposal: What sounds like satire is in fact an emerging scenario. If political credibility in New York increasingly depends on brand performance, we propose the following: abolish elections, introduce rankings. Power goes to those with the strongest brand metrics. Those who surpass 70% brand recognition, maintain a positive sentiment score on social media, activate a loyal community, and exhibit a consistent visual identity shall govern. The rest fall through the cracks – like any weak brand. Efficient, market-compliant, contemporary.