City’s banking image proves hard to look past

In many people’s minds, Charlotte is still Banktown.

So says a survey conducted as a starting point for a public relations campaign launched this year by the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, Charlotte Center City Partners and Charlotte Regional Partnership to encourage positive press about the city.

The 61 site selectors — consultants who help a company choose a location for, say, a manufacturing facility or new headquarters — who participated in the November survey ranked Charlotte as having the best business climate compared with eight other cities.

But the results also showed that Charlotte is still strongly associated with the financial services industry.

That wasn’t news to Ernie Reigel. In fact, it’s a big part of his charge as co-chairman of the Charlotte Public Relations Campaign Board: Get the word out about everything Charlotte has to offer.

“There’s just a lot of interesting and positive, constructive things to talk about here,” Reigel said. “It’s not like we’re making up stuff. You don’t have to make it up. It’s there.”

Advantage Carolina, a nonprofit created by the chamber in 1999, is funding the campaign at $200,000 a year for two years. The second year of funding has not been approved yet.

Those involved with the campaign say the financial industry’s presence in Charlotte, and the strong association with the city, is not a bad thing. But Michael Smith, president and CEO of Center City Partners, would like Charlotte to be known as having a more diverse economy.

“I think that anytime you are only known as one thing, and it’s an incomplete understanding, is a weakness,” he said. “That means when you’re recruiting jobs, you might not get the look. And being in the game is everything.”

Other industries

The results of the survey, conducted by New York-based Development Counsellors International, showed some awareness of other growing industries in the region, including energy and environment. None of them ranked as high as the banks, though.

But the major players in those industries in Charlotte said they could have predicted those results.

Dave Scanzoni, a spokesman for Duke Energy Corp., said he wasn’t surprised that there wasn’t much recognition of Charlotte’s energy sector. Despite advances such as Duke’s pending $17.7 million acquisition of Raleigh-based Progress Energy, a move that would put the country’s largest power company in Charlotte, the history of the bank industry in Charlotte is still difficult to overcome, he said.

“Energy emerging as a sector has really only happened in the last couple years,” he said. But growth has a snowball effect, he added: As more energy companies move or open offices in Charlotte, the sector will gain momentum.

Besides, he said, just because the site selectors who responded to the survey weren’t familiar with the role of the energy industry in Charlotte, that doesn’t mean everyone is in the dark.

“People in the energy industry know Charlotte, because Duke has historically been such a major player,” he said.

‘It is overlooked’

The biotechnology industry in the Charlotte-area faces similar challenges, said Marjorie Benbow, executive director of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center‘s Greater Charlotte office. While Charlotte as a city isn’t as well known for biotech, the Carolinas are, she said.

“If you just talk about biotech, I think the amount of attention we get is pretty big, and I think it’s because of the icon of the North Carolina Research Campus,” she said. The campus is in Kannapolis.

The health care industry, in particular, is one that’s often overlooked when it comes to estimating economic impact, said Jim Tobalski, senior vice president of marketing for Presbyterian Healthcare.

“I think it is overlooked, not because it’s not valued, but because it’s human nature to look at construction and manufacturing and retail and banks as economic drivers,” he said.

But the health care industry, with Presbyterian and Carolinas HealthCare System based in Charlotte, is a huge economic driver, Tobalski said. Besides the 9,700 people that Presbyterian employs — from nurses and doctors to biotechnology engineers to receptionists — it also creates jobs for pharmacists and medical device suppliers.

Russ Guerin, executive vice president of business development at Carolinas HealthCare, said CHS is the largest economic driver in the county. Although it might be overlooked now, there could come a time when Charlotte is known for its health care presence on par with Rochester, Minn., where the Mayo Clinic is headquartered, Guerin said.

“I hope we get there,” he said. “But I think it will take a more active approach than ‘It’ll just happen.'”

Not downplaying banks

Despite some negative press after the financial crisis, including a Washington Post story published in October with the headline “This is the bust in the boomtown that banks built,” Ronnie Bryant, president and CEO of the Charlotte Regional Partnership, insists that the goal of the campaign is not to distance Charlotte from the banks.

“We’re not trying to downplay financial services,” he said. “We are making sure that in addition to financial services, when you look at this region, you’re looking at a very strong economic entity.”

The financial services presence in Charlotte put the city on the map, which is a good thing, Reigel said.

“Some cities aren’t known for anything,” he said, adding that because Charlotte has a strong financial presence, it’s still seen as an economically strong city by other businesses.

The survey was just a starting point for the campaign to get a feel for how Charlotte is perceived, he said.

The next step will be to determine which industries to promote.

“We’d like to be known by about six different things,” he said, laughing. “But you have limited resources in terms of what to do and how you can use it, and you have limited time and attention from the different sources you’re trying to get the information to.”