Cave City’s convention center is undergoing rebranding

BY MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
GLASGOW NEWS 1
Forty-three years after its birth, the Cave City Convention Center is in the process of getting a new name as part of a rebranding effort.
The new name – Cave Area Conference Center – and logo were revealed via Facebook earlier this week as sort of a “soft opening” of the idea, said Ashley Huff, assistant tourism director for the Cave City Tourist and Convention Commission. Huff works with marketing efforts for the center as well as the commission, which is the facility’s managing entity.
As with most business-type name changes, it has been and will continue for a while to be a bit of a process. Huff said Thursday that staff members have been gathering estimates for signage, and other items will have to be replaces as well.
The commission, which was formed just two years before the center opened in 1980, received a Tourism Recovery and Investment grant of $100,000 from the Kentucky Department of Tourism that was available through the American Rescue Plan Act that is intended specifically to help with the rebranding costs.

She said the hope was that the broadening of the geographic part of the name to “cave area” rather than just “Cave City” would feel more inviting for people in adjoining counties who may want to use the facility that boasts 10,000 square feet of gathering space(s) for groups of 25 to 600.
“When I started to like, community members, was that they all did not want the green anymore, no green,” she said. “They wanted more color. They wanted something more modern, so, I went with the tree.”
The previous logo is four C’s, or horse shoe shapes, back to back and pointing outward to the four primary compass directions.
The new image selected is a slightly modified, mostly blue version of the “tree of life” symbol, which contains a root system, the trunk and branches with leaves. To Huff, the roots represent the caves in the area, and the tree in general represents rebirth, just like the convention center and, to a certain extent, its personnel are having in the coming year, with the anticipated retirement of co-director Greg Davis, she said. Jennifer McNett, the other co-director, is expected to take on the mantle of responsibility.
“People just want new ideas. They want new images, new designs. People are ready for things to move forward, so the horse shoe is no more. I did away with the green [lettering and former logo]. There’s not very much green on the tree.”
She said she had hoped to use a cave-entrance image, but that was nixed.
She had “sneaked” one bat onto the image, not sure whether the commission would go for it, but they actually voted to add two more, so ultimately, a nod to the karst topography’s influence on the area was added in the form of a family of bats, hanging from a low branch on the tree. The new name and logo were officially approved by the commission at its February meeting, she said.
“I had to get something about the caves in there. I had to,” Huff said.
She said that one of the things that has surprised and fascinated her when she and other staff members have attended travel shows farther north, people they meet from Cincinnati and Indianapolis, for example, “all talk about the bats.”