Seoul's crowdsourced city brand I.Seoul.U: mocked as broken English, adopted anyway

Seoul's 2002 slogan 'Hi Seoul' had aged out, and Mayor Park Won-soon wanted a 'futuristic global brand' to draw international tourists and investment. Instead of hiring an agency quietly, the city opened the choice to a mass public contest.

Put the city between 'I' and 'U': Seoul becomes the dot that connects two people — and let the name come from a contest the whole world was invited to join.

236,000 people joined — 26,544 of them foreign nationals — filing more than 16,000 entries, a record for a Seoul public contest. In October 2015 the city proclaimed I.Seoul.U, winner of 58.2 percent of the citizen-and-expert vote, and spent ₩800 million developing the brand.

Global ridicule for its untranslatable grammar, followed by the opposite in the data: awareness rose from 63 to 84 percent and approval from 52.8 to 70.7 percent by the city's 2018 poll, with 29 giant 3D logos installed at landmarks — before the city scrapped it in 2022.

Seoul's city branding had been 'Hi Seoul' since 2002, a greeting-era slogan that critics called incomprehensible to the English speakers it targeted. Mayor Park Won-soon asked for a 'futuristic global brand' and, unusually, let the public build it: a city contest drew 236,000 participants, more than 16,000 submitted entries, and an expert panel narrowed the field before citizens voted.

The winner, proclaimed at Seoul Square on 28 October 2015 with 58.2 percent of the vote, was I.Seoul.U — the city sitting between 'I' and 'U' as the dot that connects them. English-language critics found the grammar broken and the meaning untranslatable, and the ridicule became the brand's international headline. The city spent ₩800 million developing it and over ₩1 billion installing 29 three-dimensional versions at landmarks, from Gimpo Airport to Nodeulseom island.

Then the numbers moved the other way. Seoul government polls tracked awareness climbing from 63 percent (2016) to 84 percent, and approval from 52.8 to 70.7 percent by late 2018; among foreign visitors surveyed on the city's site, 95.5 percent knew the slogan and 98 percent viewed it favorably. The people who had chosen it had, in the main, decided to keep it.

It still ended in 2022: a new administration's task force concluded the brand wasn't competitive enough against New York or Amsterdam, and retired it in favor of a successor — with a tourism slogan, 'My Soul, Seoul', launching first and being widely mistaken for the replacement.

The contest made 236,000 people stakeholders before the slogan existed, so criticism landed on a name the city already owned collectively.

The form is memorable precisely because it is odd: 'I.Seoul.U' reads like a sentence the reader finishes, which no generic city tagline manages.

The city defended its pick rather than retreating, installing it physically across the capital until familiarity did the work ridicule couldn't undo.

Measurement was continuous — annual polls tracked awareness and approval — so the city could see the mockery and the metrics diverge in real time.

It shows the ceiling of democracy in naming: participation builds tolerance, but it cannot give a slogan meaning that translates cleanly abroad.

Participation buys patience: a slogan people chose survives mockery that would kill an imposed one. Grammar is not the test of a brand — familiarity and ownership are.

From January 2022 a mayoral task force worked on a replacement, and in June the city announced I.Seoul.U would be scrapped, judging it too weak to compete for international tourists and investors against brands like New York's or Amsterdam's. The new tourism slogan 'My Soul, Seoul' launched that month and was immediately confused with the city brand, and the eventual replacement carried none of the contest democracy that had made I.Seoul.U hard to hate.