Old image: Westchester County, land of golf courses and Izod shirts.
New image: Westchester County, land of the brainiacs.
That”™s the gist of a three-year, $300,000 marketing campaign that Westchester County will launch this fall to entice new businesses to the area and thus reinvent itself.
In reaching out to companies large and small in the biotech, financial, green, health care and information technology industries, the campaign will draw on virtually every aspect of county culture, from businesses to academia to the arts to religious groups.
“Make no mistake about it, it is a 180-degree turn, a very different, aggressive approach to presenting the county,” said Laurence P. Gottlieb, director of its Office of Economic Development.
”˜Work, Think, Stay”™
In the past, advertising campaigns banked on the county”™s reputation as a place of drowsy, pastoral affluence, as immortalized in everything from ”™30s screwball comedies to NBC”™s “Seinfeld” and “Law & Order.”
But, Gottlieb says, “those days are over.”
“When we talk about Westchester, we”™re not talking about golf courses,” he said. “We”™re talking about the intellectual quality of the work force.”
That idea reflects both a statistical and economic reality.
Forty-five percent of county residents have at least a bachelor”™s degree and of those, about half have advanced degrees. That”™s almost double the U.S. average.
So Westchester residents are among the best educated in the nation, with strong public school systems and colleges serving as a kind of collective farm team to replenish an educated populace. At a time of economic and government uncertainty, this becomes what Gottlieb calls “a unique selling point,” particularly to the targeted industries.
“Intellectual capital plays to the strength of biotech, IT, health care, finance and green,” Gottlieb said.
And even though many of the workers in these fields may spend part of their time telecommuting, he said, “(the companies) still have to cluster smart workers together.”
Gottlieb can see a cluster of biotech companies springing up along the Hudson River, for instance, around Regeneron in Tarrytown and Aureon in Yonkers. The idea is to give like-minded individuals a place to hang out together. (If this were a literary work it might be called “Work, Think, Stay.”)
His ambitions for the county are not limited to the Hudson, however.
“This has to encapsulate all Westchester residents,” Gottlieb said. “We have smart kids in Mount Vernon and in Chappaqua. This cuts across race, social standing and many disciplines.”
Changing the mindset
The focus on the intellectual quality of the Westchester work force also affords the county an opportunity to address what is perhaps its biggest challenge, Gottlieb said ”“ that it is “completely invisible to the rest of the world from the perspective of a digital footprint.”
Much of the campaign, then ”“ funded by the county”™s Industrial Development Agency ”“ will be conducted online. But the first phase, which begins with an official announcement at the end of September, will use traditional PR tools, including print media and events, at least initially.
The campaign will also embrace existing businesses, 80 percent of which are made up of 10 or fewer employees.
“We want to change the mindset of Westchester businesses,” Gottlieb said, “specifically that they are not in control of their own destinies.”
While the project is spearheaded by the county government, Gottlieb said it”™s about the county, not its government.
“The best thing we can do in county government is to promote the county and then get the hell out of the way.”
