Customized BizCosts® consulting services are available to corporations seeking specialized business operating cost information. Project-specific BizCosts® Reports can be developed for operating groups in a wide range of manufacturing fields as well as administrative back office, corporate headquarters, distribution warehousing, information technology, research & development, contact center and other business units.

BizCosts® Reports can be designed and scaled to meet project-specific corporate needs for cost-auditing, due diligence, competitive industry intelligence and site selection planning. Customized BizCosts® Reports can also be prepared for retail services, including franchise operations. Surveyed cities can range from regional U.S. alternative sites to global city comparisons.

Market analysts, real estate developers, city planners and economic development organizations can also benefit from BizCosts® support tailored to their specific research, planning and economic development goals. Independent BizCosts® Reports, e.g., can authoritatively document comparative advantages of selected development projects, cities, counties or countries.

 

Objective, cost-based & market-sensitive target industry recommendations along with well-grounded industry attraction strategies & support can also be provided drawing from The Boyd Company’s four decades of industry site selection experience and proprietary insights into new and emerging corporate location trends.

 

 

Location Branding in the Internet and Blogosphere World:
The Founder’s Message

 

 

John H. “Jack” Boyd, founder, The Boyd Co., Inc.

Since the founding of our site selection firm in 1975, competition among cities, states and countries for new corporate investment and jobs has become big business, a multi-billion dollar global industry in and of itself. Politicians, on the right and left, all run on the platform of new jobs. In the U.S, 50 state economic development agencies with their war chests and foot soldiers compete at a level that can only be described as The Second War Between the States.

 

Willy Loman would never believe it, but a new breed of salesmen are roaming the country and the world selling land, labor, tax incentives and even the ill-defined “business climate” and “quality-of-life”. With only a relative handful of corporate relocations each year compared to the tens of thousands of competing economic development agencies, battles are fierce, budgets are big and marketing campaigns are smooth and sophisticated -- with the adoption of modern Location Branding techniques a growing trend among development agencies, large and small.

 

 

 

Where It All Began

 

I Love New York

The I Love New York campaign resurrected the city’s tourist industry and helped to stem the outflow of industry and jobs from the state during the difficult 70’s

In 1977, William S. Doyle, Deputy Commissioner of the New York State Department of Commerce, set in motion the modern era of Location Branding and development promotion with the state’s iconic I Love New York campaign developed by Wells, Rich & Greene, the Madison Avenue ad agency founded by the charismatic, Advertising Hall of Famer, Mary Wells Lawrence. Her agency’s creative work for clients like Braniff Airlines, Proctor & Gamble and Miles Laboratories’ Alka-Seltzer brand became a mainstay of advertising’s golden age.

 

Wells, Rich & Greene, the legendary ad agency behind the I Love New York campaign

TV spots and media placements of the I Love New York campaign were run in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and other Sunbelt cities that were attracting companies from New York and the Northeast, most notably American Airlines and its high profile relocation of its corporate headquarters from New York City to Dallas, an ominous move that ushered in a new era of corporate head office migration from New York.

 

I Love New York Disco Version

The groundbreaking I Love New York campaign has been credited with resurrecting New York City 's fortunes as a tourist destination, which had been devastated after the city's fiscal crisis and racial unrest of the mid-1970s. The logo itself has gone on to become a cultural icon, instantly recognized around the world and adopted for numerous purposes, licensed an unlicensed.

 

The epic campaign had many branding spin-offs ranging from T-shirts to coffee mugs to the disco recording of I Love New York. Another version is now the state song of New York.

 

 

Prime Time in Kansas City

 

Kansas City's Prime Time branding program became a model for other cities

Another major break in the longstanding partnership between development organizations and traditional advertising came not from Manhattan but from the nation’s heartland: Kansas City , MO. A perfect storm of purpose, leadership and business savvy came together in Kansas City in the mid-1970’s with the goal of changing the city’s former cow town image to a modern corporate mecca in the nation’s mid-section.

 

Kansas City’s town fathers were led by its most famous mayor, Charles Wheeler (both a J.D. and M.D.) and a remarkable A-list of business titans: Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, Don Hall, Chairman of Hallmark Cards, Henry Bloch, Founder of H&R Block, Ewing Kaufmann, Owner of the Kansas City Royals and Miller Nichols, developer of Kansas City’s famed Country Club Plaza.

 

 

Author, humorist and Kansas City native Calvin Trillin

This impressive group knew the value of branding from their own businesses and fashioned what many consider a branding classic in the field of development promotion: Kansas City ’s Prime Time program. They did so with the assistance of Carl Byoir Associates, a top New York PR firm, and Kansas City target industry research from The Boyd Company of Princeton , NJ , commissioned by the State of Missouri . Newspapers throughout the country and magazines like National Geographic, Newsweek and the Saturday Evening Post wrote about the transformation of Kansas City anchored by its new Crown Center complex, new sports stadiums and airport and the city’s landing a national political convention.

 

Calvin Trillin once named Arthur Bryant's Barbeque “the single best restaurant in the world”

Lighter stories featured humorist and Kansas City native Calvin Trillin’s penchant for Kansas City ’s famous Winstead’s Hamburgers and Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque Ribs. In an essay in The New Yorker, Trillin wrote that “Arthur Bryant’s is the best damn restaurant in the world.” Throughout the country, other cities looked at Prime Time’s Location Branding and media successes along with its trend-setting public/private partnership as a model for their development programs.

 

 

Las Vegas "What Happens Here, Stays Here"

 

 

Las Vegas “What Happens Here, Stays Here” branding campaign has become a cultural phenomenon

Another high profile Location Branding program is the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority's What Happens Here, Stays Here campaign created by R&R Partners, the award-winning public relations agency based in Las Vegas and with offices throughout the West. The mastermind agency is led by the incomparable Billy Vassiliadis, aptly described by The New York Times as follows: "Every dream needs a merchant, every myth a mythmaker. In Las Vegas , that job falls to Billy Vassiliadis."

 

R&R Partners CEO Billy Vassiliadis. His credo, a simple one: “Build the brand, protect the brand.”

R&R Partners was named Grand Marketers of the Year by Brandweek for their groundbreaking work on behalf of Las Vegas and the Las Vegas economy and the famous campaign was named by the trade publication Advertising Age "a cultural phenomenon.”

 

Leveraging Nevada ’s positive tax climate and an international airport and a business support infrastructure fueled by the hospitality industry, Las Vegas is attracting new non-gaming corporate investment and jobs …… most recently the corporate headquarters of Zappos.com, the world’s largest online shoe and clothing store.

 

 

Jack Boyd talks branding and development at the landmark Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas.  Visionary Las Vegas developer Howard Hughes took over the 8th and 9th floors of the Desert Inn where he lived and ran his command center.   After refusing to leave,  the reclusive  billionaire bought the entire hotel.

The Boyd Company of Princeton knows the ever-evolving Las Vegas market well. Since 1987, we have provided Location Branding counsel and research to The Nevada Development Authority, The City of North Las Vegas and the visionary development firm The Howard Hughes Corporation of Las Vegas.

 

 

Location Branding and Economic Development

 

 

New York ’s I Love New York and Kansas City ’s Prime Time, both with their innovative  Location Branding approach, changed everything in the dog-eat-dog  arena of economic development and set the table for more recent campaigns like What Happens Here, Stays Here.  Up until Prime Time, the field  was pretty much the province of print advertising agencies and direct mail marketers.

 

Since Prime Time, The Boyd Company has been asked by development organizations as diverse as The World Bank,  the Province of Alberta, the Government of the District of Columbia and the Investment Properties Division of the Mormon Church to provide Location Branding counsel and research. Often we are asked to explain the role of Location Branding in a successful development strategy and to explain the differences between it and advertising, a much better understood field but one bringing far less credibility to the message.

 

We explain that careful research and detailed study are the first steps in any program to brand a place and to begin to shape corporate opinion about it.  As a third-party consultant, we must thoroughly understand our client’s city, state or country and be able to identify its strengths, weaknesses and competitive advantages. This process starts with pedestrian, on-the-ground field research carried out in the manner of a Boyd corporate site selection search.

 

Relevance must be the key. We must isolate those branding elements of our client’s location that are meaningful, distinct and timely to what is going on elsewhere in America and the world. Because something is interesting  in Omaha , Tucson or  Costa Rica does not make it significant or noteworthy in New York , Chicago , Los Angeles , London or in other major corporate centers of influence. 

 

The process – of digging up the facts, interpreting them on a national scale and against a national or world criteria in a highly professional manner – requires great skill and considerable knowledge. It can’t be done in a vacuum by a person or firm whose views and exposure are limited. It requires a great deal of discipline and experience.  It is impossible to “wish” a poorly researched and badly communicated brand concept to success.  If Location Branding is properly utilized, it is a powerful tool and valuable advocate for the development organization it serves. Now, its value and impact far exceeds the days of I Love New York and Prime Time owing to today’s 24-hour news cycle and but even more importantly due to  the internet and blogosphere

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The Internet, the Blogosphere and Location Branding

 

The internet changes everything and brings incalculable value to Location Branding and promoting places

The internet and blogosphere are game-changers for development organizations and their use of Location Branding.  First, we tell these organizations that corporate opinion is what it’s all about.   While newspaper and magazine articles and TV  interviews are certainly the most obvious evidence of success of a Location Branding program,  they are only important because they are an indication that opinions and perceptions of corporate decision-makers are being shaped.

While the shelf life of newspaper and magazine articles and on-air interviews in the days of Prime Time and I Love New York were measured in days or weeks and their readership limited in geography, today’s print and electronic media coverage now extends to the internet and blogosphere and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and instantly reaches a global, world-wide corporate audience. Moreover, these same branding articles and themes remain forever on major internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and others. This information will be available at the fingertips of corporate site-seekers researching new locations on the web now and for years to come. The value here to the development  organization is incalculable.

 

One word of caution here, corporate opinions are not changed quickly.  It is a slow, steady process with no shortcuts. There are no instant successes in branding programs to influence corporate opinion or to re-shape the image of a city ….. or to establish an image or brand from scratch. I recall Larry Lebenow, the venerable Carl Byoir account executive for Prime Time,  sharing with me the early results of a public opinion poll over cocktails at the old Top of the Sixes restaurant atop 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where the poll question was “What do you think of when you think of Kansas City?” The response from more than one jaded New Yorker was: “I don’t think of Kansas City at all.”

 

So, yes, Location Branding needs constant nurturing, feeding and reinforcing. Success is sometimes slow, but steady, that’s where faith in your community, your development program and your consultant come in. The consultant must believe in what he is doing – and so must his client.