Grappling with our image gap

02-02-2003

Southwestern Pennsylvanians: Who are we, and what makes us special?

Asking these questions is easy. Answering them with any degree of confidence or consensus is exceedingly difficult.

Yet accomplishing that mission is crucial to bringing together a geographically diverse, 10-county region in order to develop common messages we can use to tell the world why people should live, work or visit here.

Over the past six months, an ad hoc committee composed of more than 50 volunteer representatives from dozens of regional business, civic and university organizations have been wrestling with these issues, trying to pin down the intangible attributes that capture our essence.

Organized under the auspices of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, the so-called Image Gap Committee initiated a review of existing studies of other people's perceptions of this area. Then, using a $200,000 grant from local foundations and economic development organizations, it commissioned three marketing research and public relations firms to conduct a very limited survey of impressions about the region gathered from three "core audience" groups: tourists, business decision-makers and young professional people. Before you can address people's perceptions, the logic goes, it helps to know what those perceptions are.

Intended to be indicators rather than scientific facts, the initial findings of this survey were revealed in December.

The bad news is that the world doesn't know that much about us, and of what they do know, much is either outdated or even false.

The good news is that when people have a chance to experience the region first-hand, they are genuinely and pleasantly surprised with what they discover. That difference is the image gap.

Reports of a 45-word working summary of that study were published in the PG Business pages and set off a flurry of public comment and pointed criticism, some of which appeared in our Letters to the Editor and Opinion Pages.

As travel editor of this newspaper, whose circulation area roughly approximates the region under study, I have been observing this process with interest, aware of how important it is for the area to find some way to unify its outreach efforts, not to mention its own self-perceptions. That is why I have also participated peripherally in the committee's deliberations.

I am constantly inundated with marketing materials and promotional schemes from other areas trying to attract attention and visitors. I also see many of the articles that a variety of other publications print about our region.

Based on my admittedly unscientific assessment of these articles, I'd have to say the committee's initial assessments are accurate. So many of these articles start with headlines such as "Surprise, a smoky city no longer" and then go on to express amazement at all the physical, cultural and social assets to be found in Pittsburgh and southwestern Pennsylvania.

Step two in the process has been to try to discern and describe what it is that makes us special. Last week, the committee unveiled to an audience of several hundred people at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center the five broad attributes that it believes distinguish the region. The initial attributes were reported in some detail in the PG Business section, but for readers who may have missed that, here's a quick summation.

Essentially, the process suggests that southwestern Pennsylvania is an area with world-class urban resources, bountiful natural beauties and a small-town feel, a place with a strong heritage of innovation and transformation, whose residents have genuine opportunities to make an impact, along with pride in working, making and doing.

Four other informational meetings will be held throughout this month at various locations in Beaver, Butler, Washington and Westmoreland counties. In addition, a Web site, www.brandpittsburghregion.info, has been set up to inform interested parties, and it invites public comments and suggestions.

After this input has been factored in, a more concise set of attributes will be developed, along with various strategies to help deliver these messages elsewhere.

But rather than coming up with a single advertising tagline or logo that tries to encompass these regional attributes, the plan is to develop a common set of informational tools and marketing elements that all the various entities throughout the region can incorporate in their outreach efforts. The idea is that if we can all broadcast similar messages that the world at large will get the idea that their perceptions about this area need to change. That re-education message can be delivered as well by individual residents talking to their family and friends in other places as it can by multinational corporations and tourism bureaus.

Instead of a big-budget advertising campaign (for which there's no budget), it's intended to be a slow fix, measured in years rather than months, an attempt to get everyone on the same page, but a page that's based on research and reality rather than clever promotional pitches.

That's an ambitious goal to be sure. But the process itself is even more important than any marketing messages that may come out of this process. It's an attempt to be regionally inclusive rather than Pittsburgh specific. The city may be the center of attention, the point where the rivers come together, but the entire confluence is much, much bigger than that.

If after a decade this effort has done nothing more than getting us all to work together to tell a common story, it will have accomplished a great deal indeed.

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