'Marketing the region': a theory not practiced
Efforts to give the Pittsburgh region a spiffy national image, says Mark DeSantis, remain incoherent and ineffectual.
Root problem for Pittsburgh's marketing efforts include a lack of direction. No one has clearly articulated or understood just what this region is marketing, to whom it is marketing and what it hopes to achieve.
Concepts:
- A region is a place. laces are not things.
- Marketing is a careful, long-term process to inform and persuade a well-understood customer processing a well-defined need.
- Marketing should be a clearly articulated offering.
- Marketing is part of a larger strategy.
- Some in Pittsburgh have tried to market the region in the past.
For marketing of Pittsburgh to work in the future, it is important to be ourselves.
- Don't address what we do no have.
- Lasting success isn't a resemblance to elsewhere.
- Countering reality hurts.
- Find our attributes that others don't have and can't easily duplicate.
Pittsburgh has:
- A quirky culture,
- an emerging heterogeneous tech sector,
- affordable living.
Some quote from P-G, April 4, 1990.