A Brand for Today's New England?

By Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson

In an age of clever commercial and place branding, how about New England? Las Vegas is flash. New York is the Big Apple. So how does this historic, established corner of the nation remind the world that it exists, excels, offers uniquely wonderful qualities? How can it use that identity to draw and hold students, workers, retirees?

It’s true, brands are always part myth. But if they have a core of reality, they build value, identity, pride. A better brand builds bonds.

Take Vermont. It’s green, it’s lovely hillside farms, it’s picturesque towns. It’s a quiet but firm sense of community. In the words of Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s — Vermont is all about the “purity, untainted, wholesome quality” he claims for his own product. Vermont resists mass ways and the likes of Wal-Mart. Skeptics say Vermont just “sells nostalgia;” the fact is it declared itself beckoning country. And Americans come by the millions.

Maine has a real brand too. It’s the rugged, outdoors image, land of dramatic seascapes and northern forests, territory of the backwoodsman and tough, taciturn lobsterman. It’s individualism but a willing hand for a neighbor in trouble. L.L. Bean prizes the Maine image for itself-- integrity, durability, resilience, and a strong land conservation ethic, as one executive put it to us.

Each of the states has brand power: New Hampshire’s granite peaks, glacial lakes and fierce “Live Free or Die” independence. Plucky little Rhode Island with its lovely bay, Newport mansions and comeback capital city. Massachusetts, home to New England’s star city of Boston and a concentration of brainpower with few global equals. Connecticut, the state of personal wealth, industrial ingenuity and insurance.

But what of New England as a whole? Can its states drop their typically divisive ways and find a way to work together to draw students, attract entrepreneurs and investment?

We believe there’s a fantastic asset to build on — a brand-in-waiting that’s been evolving, ripening for close to four centuries, a core value no modern advertising campaign could begin to emulate.

So what is the brand? Dozens of ideas came up in our interviews. Consider these:

• Birthplace of the nation’s culture and the American Revolution
• A place of ingenuity, creativity, and adaptability, coping with northern winters and challenging seas -- thus the image of the “tough” (but ultimately successful) New Englander
• Constancy, reliability, persistence… here, historian James Truslow Adams wrote, “the gristle of conscience, work, thrift, shrewdness, duty, became bone.”
• Constant innovation — a region forever reinventing itself, from farming to clipper ships, textiles to high finance to biotechnology, and today’s bid to make arts and design a new century economic key
• Reverence for learning, America’s premier center of world-renowned universities and research laboratories, hundreds of colleges, the birthing spot of America’s first public schools
• An ever-expanding vision of human rights, from overthrowing Britain’s colonial rule to championing abolition of slavery to today’s controversies of civil unions and gay marriages
• Deep suspicion of war, but New England states in the forefront of patriotism and volunteering (like today’s Vermont, with largest per-capita numbers of Iraq war volunteers — and fatalities)
• Authenticity of place, embodied in the intimate scale of the historic New England town, now also in gritty Industrial Revolution cities like Lowell
• High environmental values, the legacy of Henry David Thoreau, innumerable land trusts, preservation efforts from Cape Cod to the Maine Coast, Long Island Sound to the White Mountains — clear pointers to a 21st century New England that should lead in renewable energy, combating global warming, and building sustainable communities
• Town meeting America — public-mindedness, taking responsibility for one’s own community, not yielding to so-called “professionals” — New Englanders may often seem stingy, but they do volunteer
• Character and courage in public life — defying partisan stereotypes, the region that produced such independent figures as Eliot Richardson, John Chafee, Ralph Flanders, Warren Rudman, George Aiken, Lowell Weicker, Margaret Chase Smith, Edmund Muskie and many still active on New England's congressional delegation

The skeptic will ask: But what about today’s jarring New England realities — pockets of political corruption, cold-hearted NIMBYism in privileged towns, “McMansions” that stomp on their historic setting, the new-born addiction of casino gambling, and a barrage of fast-food fed obesity?

Our reply: No branding is ever complete; great places are always far from perfect, forever “works in progress.”

The hugest New England peril we encountered was complacency — a belief the region has always excelled and triumphed, so why worry about the present?

But we also heard a chorus of impatience from thoughtful New Englanders who believe it’s time for more working together and less stubborn Yankee go-it-alone-ism. Success in this century, we heard, will require New Englanders to cultivate — in business, universities, government, and the region’s growing array of non-profits — a set of radically expanded networking and collaboration skills.

Innovation and creativity made New England great; today’s challenge is to connect the dots of New England’s store of curious minds, its pools of capital and strong institutions, to do it again — and build the brand for the new century.