|
Last year, Milwaukee’s Chamber of Commerce,
Visitors Bureau, Economic Development Office, and a variety of other
local institutions pooled their resources to try to sell their city
to the rest of the world in a cohesive way. Rather than continue
individual marketing strategies with separate advertising themes,
they hired Development Counsellors International (DCI), a Manhattan-based
consulting firm specializing in regional marketing, to help them
create the city’s first integrated campaign. It is expected
to be launched this May.
In the past, city tourism departments, economic
development groups, and other government and civic organizations-each
with different priorities and separate budgets-rarely combined their
marketing efforts. Today, many municipal leaders, like those in
Milwaukee, are sharing resources to come up with sharper, more professional
strategies to sell their cities to diverse consumer audiences, among
them business decision makers, conventioneers, and professionals.
Whether making their market debuts, retooling their images, or repositioning
themselves to reach new demographics, cities are beginning to regard
themselves as the new brands, and everyone as their customer.
Choices of where to live, where to visit, and where
to do business have expanded over the past decade, as advances in
communications technology increasingly enable individuals and companies
to operate efficiently pretty much anywhere, almost regardless of
geography. Sensing the opportunity, some local leaders were beginning
to take an integrated marketing approach even before September 11,
promoting their communities as alternatives to big cities. But following
the attacks, the apparent stability and quality of life offered
by smaller and lesser-known cities well away from the national capitals
of commerce and business have become even bigger selling points.
Mark Zandi, chief economist for Economy.com, an
online provider of economic and financial research and analysis,
says that now might be the perfect time for some oft-overlooked
cities and regions to advertise. “Things that were weights
on some economies two years ago are now assets, like the fact that
they are more removed from the hustle and bustle of urban areas,”
he says. “Now that big urban areas are having major problems
financially, and people are more wary about being there in general,
it’s probably a good time for many of these places to be aggressive
in marketing and positioning themselves as alternative places to
visit, do business, and live.”
That’s because smaller and lesser-known cities
are expected to be less affected economically by the tragedies than
are the larger, flashier ones. For example, according to Economy.com’s
forecast of economic growth by metro area, prior to September 11,
Milwaukee’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) was expected
to grow 2.29 percent through the second quarter of 2002. After the
attacks, the company reduced the city’s growth projections
by 2.6 percentage points. Meanwhile, Chicago, Milwaukee’s bigger
and better-known competitor, was expected to grow 2.86 percent through
he second quarter of 2002, and after the attacks, its projected
GDP was lowered by 3.13 percentage points.
As American Demographics found in our December
2001 special report, Americans are undergoing a subtle reality shift
in almost every fundamental aspect of their lives. As a result,
quality of life attributes such as better commute times, access
to public parks, and clean air may play bigger roles in where people
choose to live, says Steve Higdon, president of Greater Louisville,
Inc., an organization created to promote Louisville, Kentucky, and
its surrounding regions. “What has happened to this country
has really underscored the importance of Middle America,” he
says. “Of course, we will never take advantage of this tragedy
in our marketing directly, but I do think our target audiences will
look at our product different.”
If it worked for Crest toothpaste, why not Milwaukee,
Indianapolis, or Philadelphia? The concept of branding-the idea
that one product is more valuable, has more “equity,”
than an alternative because it is attached to a recognizable name
and promise of authenticity-began about 200 years ago, when Josiah
Wedgwood realized that stamping his name on his pottery and naming
his dinnerware after English nobility made it more desirable. Fast
forward to the 1930s when Procter & Gamble’s Neil McElroy,
the company’s promotion department manager, developed the “P&G
brand management system,” an organizational structure that
assigned groups of people to handle specific marketing strategies
for competing brands.
By the 1970s and ‘80s, “brand manager”
was a coveted job title for the typical business school graduate,
and by the mid-1990s, branding began to be applied not just to products
but to the retailers that sell them, with names like Victoria’s
Secret and Bath & Body Works. “What has happened since
the turn of the millennium is that everyone else is discovering
branding,” says Roger Blackwell, a marketing professor at the
Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. “It was
inevitable that the people who market cities would turn to a concept
that has been so productive and successful for others.”
This push to integrate a city’s disparate parts
into one cohesive branding approach comes as competition among regions
for tourists, conventioneers, and skilled workers has increased
dramatically over the past 50 years. Alastair Morrison, director
of the Purdue University Tourism and Hospitality Research Center,
estimates that the number of city or regional visitors bureaus has
grown from about 250 to 1,600 since 1950. Among economic development
agencies, which specialize in industrial recruitment, the competition
is even greater. According to the International Economic Development
Council, for any given business relation or expansion, an estimated
15,000 cities, regions, or communities are in contention, and that’s
only in the U.S. Says Ted Levine, chairman of consulting firm DCI:
“If you think about the fact that there are only about a half-dozen
car manufacturers, it puts things into perspective. This is an extremely
competitive field.”
Cities and regions are also vying for permanent
bodies, especially those with professional heads on their shoulders.
With an estimated 80 percent of jobs and wealth created by privately
owned companies or entrepreneurs, there’s pressure on cities
to keep and attract more educated workers and young entrepreneurs.
While only 16 percent of the total U.S. population moved house in
1999, better-educated people are more likely to move longer distances,
presumably for better-paying jobs, according to the Census Bureau’s
2000 Current Population Survey. Forty-seven percent of movers with
a college degree moved to a new county, either within the same state
or in another state, compared with 34 percent of those with less
than a high school education who did so. And the younger folks are
the most mobile: 34 percent of 20- to 29-year-olds and 22 percent
of 30- to 34-year-olds moved, making these demographics the primary
target for many cities and regions.
For those doing the moving, whether they are employees
looking for new digs or CEOs expanding or relocating their companies,
image has become an important deal-breaker. According to Arthur
Andersen’s “Best Cities 2000” survey of 1,433 senior
executives worldwide, conducted June through November 2000, a city’s
suitability for business is no longer just about geographic location,
tax incentives, or cheap land. Instead, the top three factors mentioned
are: “pro-business attitudes” (20 percent), “local
availability of professionals” (12 percent), and “entrepreneurial
activity” (10 percent).
“Thirty or 40 years ago, you just needed green
grass by a railroad to set up shop,” says Shari Barnett, senior
manager of global location strategies at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Now there are so many variables, and there is never just one city
that’s right for a business or employee. Barnett says she is
working with several companies that nixed her recommendation of
a city she thought perfect because decision makers had an impression
that its economy was failing or its quality of life was poor, even
though the city was actually thriving. “Things like geography
and tax incentives will get you on the short list, but at the end
of the day, if the client doesn’t perceive your city well,
they’ll move on.”
Yet, lessons from the corporate boardroom extend
only so far. Branding a city has its own set of challenges. The
first is persuading city leaders, many of them with little or no
marketing experience, that they need to do so. “You have to
convince city councils that they need to spend money on something
they know nothing about, and that’s a tough sell,” says
Elizabeth Goodgold, CEO of The Nuancing® Group, a brand consultancy
in San Diego.
Deborah Knudsen knows that dance. As president and
CEO of the Traverse City, Michigan, Convention and Visitors Bureau,
she spent 10 years trying to convince fellow civic leaders and small-business
owners to participate in a branding effort before finally succeeding
two years ago when she helped launch its brand-“A World Apart”-targeting
affluent tourists. Raised in a family of restaurateurs, Knudsen
grew up understanding the value of a brand maintaining consumer
loyalty and ensuring repeat business. “I’ve followed what
P&G and GM have been doing over the years and seen it work for
them, so I knew we should be doing it too, at least at some level,”
she says. “But it’s not easy when you’re dealing
with people from many different backgrounds.”
Even when most leaders concur on the need for such
activity, agreeing on strategy is another story. Unlike a corporation
with one CEO calling the shots as to how to proceed, a city has
multiple entities with very different, and often conflicting, priorities
and target audiences. Indianapolis is struggling with this step
in its current branding process, says Mike Lawson, president of
the Indianapolis Regional Economic Development Partnership. In the
past, the region was marketed as nine individual counties, with
nine individual budgets. Now they’ve merged, but that has simply
increased the number of cooks in the kitchen. What’s more,
there are a number of other private and nonprofit organizations
in the area, all promoting the city differently to various consumers.
“The biggest challenge we face is coming to
a consensus on an umbrella brand that will work for everyone’s
consumers,” says Lawson. “It can be difficult to get people
to see the big picture all the time, and there’s a lot of ‘protecting
turf’ going on.” But they’re working on it. Representatives
of six entities, including Lawson’s economic development group,
the city’s Arts Council, the Indiana Sports Corporation, and
Indianapolis Downtown, Inc., met all through last summer, and have
hired an independent facilitator, a marketing professor at Indiana
University, to help.
Another obstacle to branding cities has to do with
turnover in leadership, especially those in cities and counties
with term limits for elected officials. “Often, you’ll
have political leaders who agree that someone should put the region
on the map, but then say, ‘It’s not my job, I’m out
of here in a few years,” says Rod Underhill, chief executive
of Spherical, Inc., the brand strategy consulting arm of The Richards
Group, a Dallas-based advertising agency. That’s why a good
brand strategy has to be based and rigorously analyzed, he says.
Otherwise, every mayoral election can bring a change in focus resulting
in a stop-and-start marketing effort that is ineffective. “There
has to be so much conviction among the other civic organizations
and leaders that branding needs to get to withstand a turnover in
leadership,” he adds.
Underhill says that level of conviction exists in
the Dallas-Fort Worth region-the Metroplex. The dual Chambers of
Commerce hired Spherical to help brand the area. While details about
their strategy are still under wraps, Underhill says that the biggest
challenge has to do with reeling in and managing a brand that has
been unmanaged for so long. “Most cities are a victim of their
unmanaged reputations,” he says. “In the absence of a
brand strategy, Dallas-Fort Worth conjures images of J.R. Ewing
and cheerleaders, but those cultural icons are not necessarily what
the city would like to be known for.”
And then there’s the opposite problem. DCI’s
Levine estimates that 60 percent to 70 percent of all cities in
the U.S. have no image at all in the public mind. Thus, finding
a core distinguishable asset, or “unique selling proposition,”
as he terms it, becomes even more important. Nancy Koehn, marketing
professor at Harvard and author of Brand New: How Entrepreneurs
Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell (Harvard
Business School Press, 2001), recommends that decision makers turn
to their city’s unique histories. “Almost every city or
region has some interesting piece of history that everyone can relate
to,” she says. “That can be your connection point with
consumers. In any kind of branding, connecting on a personal level
is always a very strong motivator.”
But for some cities, history is double-edged. Leaders
of nine public and private civic organizations in the Richmond,
Virginia, region worked all through last summer, with Martin Branding
Worldwide of “Virginia is for Lovers” fame, on an integrated
branding effort. The region’s rich ties to America’s history
were cited as a distinguishing asset in all its focus group sessions
among all demographic groups, from tourists to business leaders
to potential residents. Still, they debated as to whether or not
that history was the best way to brand that area. Yes, the region
is the birthplace of many U.S. presidents, but it was also once
home to the country’s largest slave port, notes Greg Wingfield,
president of the Greater Richmond Partnership, the region’s
economic development organization. In the end, Richmond’s leaders
decided the positives about the area’s five-century history
outweighed any negatives, and in October 2001, its new brand was
unveiled: “The Historic Richmond Region: Easy to Love.”
Still, other cities continue to struggle with their
identity crises. A nationwide study of 300 CEOs conducted by the
Columbus, Ohio, Chamber of Commerce found that fewer than 10 percent
of respondents knew anything about that city. And its municipal
leaders are worried about the bigger picture. Columbus has consistently
been a good place to live and work, with continuous growth, says
Sally Jackson, president of the Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce.
But as business becomes more global and people become more mobile,
that won’t be enough if no one knows about it. “We need
to get a lot better at projecting what we are all about,” Jackson
says. Because, for today’s consumers, image is everything.
|
