Campaign to help boost Hawai'i's business image

By Susan Hooper
Advertiser Staff Writer

Last week a partnership of state officials and business leaders launched a marketing campaign to build Hawai'i's image as a place to do business. Given Hawai'i's decades-old, worldwide reputation as a sun-and-surf paradise, those involved say they know they have a big job ahead of them.

The project, called "Business in Hawai'i," is aimed at first convincing Hawai'i residents, and then national and international audiences, of the benefits of locating a company in the state. The marketing "brand" for the state emphasizes certain unique advantages of doing business in the Islands, including the prevalence of the aloha spirit.

The campaign's brand statement is "Hawai'i is the one place on earth to do business where life and aloha are part of the bottom line."

And many of the business leaders who took part in developing the campaign attended last week's unveiling of the brand statement, logo and print and television ads featuring three local businesses, and gave the package an enthusiastic reception.

But winning over the general public to the ideals of the campaign may prove a tougher sell. Hawai'i has an international reputation as a difficult place to have a business, and previous efforts to promote it as a business destination have met with scant success.

"A brand is not a logo. It is not a statement or a name. It is a promise that you make to your customer," said Gloria Garvey, principal with The Brand Strategy Group in Kailua, a firm that focuses on building brands with clients and was not involved in developing Hawai'i's new campaign.

"If Hawai'i is making a promise that it's a good place to do business, they'd better keep that promise. And that's particularly true when we go forward with this statement nationally and internationally. If we say Hawai'i is a great place to do business, we have to make that promise come to life when they come here, and I'm not sure we do that."

A long history

Efforts to make Hawai'i known for something other than its balmy climes and white-sand beaches date back at least 30 years to the administration of Gov. John Burns, who envisioned making the Islands a "Geneva of the Pacific" — a gathering place for leaders from around the Pacific Rim.

Later visionaries dubbed Hawai'i the "telecommunications hub of the Pacific," reasoning that its location made it the perfect spot to attract telecommunications firms from both the United States and Asia.

Neither of these dreams came to fruition, but in recent years others have replaced them.

The Hawai'i Convention Center, which opened in 1998, symbolized a goal of state officials to develop Hawai'i as a meetings destination. And state and business leaders point to two high-profile international conferences held at the convention center — the Pacific Basin Economic Council meeting in 2000 and the Asian Development Bank meeting in 2001 — as serious steps in solidifying Hawai'i's global reputation as a place to hold business gatherings.

That vision for the state has met with some setbacks, including a decision by PBEC to hold its 2002 and 2003 annual meetings in Asian cities instead of in Honolulu, as the organization had previously planned.

But Stephen Olson, PBEC's acting president, said the group's members had an "overwhelmingly positive experience" in Honolulu, and the decision to hold their meetings elsewhere "in no, way shape or form reflected negatively on Hawai'i, but instead reflected PBEC's policy objectives vis-a-vis organizations like APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation)."

State officials say they are encouraged by past results.

"I think previous efforts have been very successful, but I do think it is a cumulative effort of having business meetings, international forums, trade missions, people wanting to market their services outside of Hawai'i," said Brenda Lei Foster, executive assistant to the governor for international and national affairs. "It can never be something that is one shot."

First things first

Because it has a specific marketing campaign, the current effort to promote Hawai'i as a business destination is more focused and more visible than some previous efforts. As a result, it is also open to more specific criticism.

Lowell Kalapa, president of the government watchdog group Tax Foundation of Hawai'i, said that no matter what the creators of the "Business in Hawaii" campaign say, Hawai'i is a hard place to do business because of things such as high taxes and complicated state and local permit approval processes.

And public officials, he said, are not making the situation any easier.

"You should spend time improving the product for businesses in Hawai'i before you go out and try to sell it," he said. " ... Where is the substance (in the campaign) that says, 'We are a pro-business, supportive state that grows new business here. It's an exciting, thriving community of entrepreneurs.' It doesn't exist."

Kalapa and other critics have compared "Business in Hawaii" to the 1995 "Thumbs Up, Hawaii" campaign, a $1.3 million, privately financed effort by local executives aimed at getting Hawai'i residents to think positively during the state's lengthy economic slump. The campaign was roundly criticized by many as being both inappropriate and ineffective.

Emi Oishi Anamizu, managing director and chief executive officer of Ogilvy & Mather, Hawai'i, the advertising agency that donated its time to produce the Business in Hawaii campaign, said she believes there is a key difference between this effort and Thumbs Up.

The summary statement for Business in Hawai'i was the result of hours of surveys, interviews and focus-group meetings with about 200 local business people to find out what doing business in the state means to them.

As a result, she said, "We identified that brand, that truth, and when it's the truth, it's what it is. People can relate to it; it means something to them," she said. "And because we're all part of that brand, it has great meaning. So it's not just a feel-good campaign; it really gets down to how people feel and what the truth is."

Campaign critics

The latest effort to market the state has also met with some criticism because of its emphasis on creating a "business brand" for Hawai'i. The general public associates brands with products like Coke or Nike rather than places, critics say, and so the concept of a Hawai'i business "brand" may be hard to grasp.

But Dana Alden, professor and chairman of the marketing department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa's College of Business Administration, said he supports the branding approach.

"Creating a brand is a good way to go, because there's just so much information out in the marketplace and branding in general makes it simpler for consumers and business buyers to create a space in their brains for that information," he said.

"It makes it more tangible, more memorable. It gives a personality to the product. So I don't think any place or service or good can avoid branding now. I think we all need to create brands just so that we have some recognition in this crowded, crowded marketplace."

Hawai'i is not the only state to have embarked on a business branding project. Oklahoma launched a business-image campaign in February after extensive research showed that people had "outdated impressions, incorrect impressions or no impression at all" of the state, according to Andrea Miles, national media relations coordinator for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce.

"When people say 'Oklahoma,' it sometimes conjures up images of the Dust Bowl, Okies, the Grapes of Wrath or rural poverty," she said. " ... We wanted to change their minds and open their eyes to the Oklahoma of 2002."

The campaign's overall theme is "Oklahoma: Believing in the American Dream," she said. As in Hawai'i, organizers are launching the campaign within the state first, using the slogan "I Believe in Oklahoma."

The Oklahoma effort was begun as a government initiative and it has cost the state about $200,000 thus far, with no private-sector contributions, Oklahoma officials say.

Hawai'i's campaign, by comparison, has used $90,000 from the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, with another $410,000 coming from local businesses as in-kind contributions, according to Sharon Narimatsu, the business department's deputy director.

Another difference is that Oklahoma has steered clear of using the word "brand" in explaining its marketing effort to the public.

"What we're trying to do is create a sustainable business image," Miles said. "We call this a business image campaign, not a branding campaign. I think that resonates a little better. People understand we need to create a better business image for the state, showing why Oklahoma is a great place to live and a great place to work. But just saying we need to create a new brand for the state — does that mean we need a new flag?"

Truth in advertising

Critics of Hawai'i's campaign have also taken exception to its branding statement, which focuses on quality of life and the aloha spirit as reasons to do business in the state.

"My response is lifestyle and aloha don't pay the bills," Kalapa said.

But Alden said he believes the concept will appeal to a subset of the business community.

"It speaks to the enhanced lifestyle experience that one can have when one does business here," he said. "It won't appeal to everybody, but I think it will appeal to a certain type of business person who is looking to get out of the rat race of Los Angeles or even the Bay Area now, and have a lifestyle that is a bit more full and not quite so one-dimensional."

In spite of his support of the state's current efforts, however, Alden agrees with those who say the campaign must reflect the truth about doing business in Hawai'i.

"Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising — meaning that you better have some true quality and had better take care of all the infrastructure and other impediments to doing business, if they're there," he said. "If this brand campaign is really successful, it has to be borne out in the product."

Reach Susan Hooper at shooper@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8064.