Tampa Bay flashes more pull with busines

TRIGAUX E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published March 6, 2002

U.S. businesses looking for a new home used to avoid the Tampa Bay area for a simple reason. They could not even find it on a map.

By 1998, more businesses knew where Tampa Bay was enough to know they liked the weather. But many companies still worried that the area business community was too thin, and looked elsewhere to expand.

No more, claims a new business survey. Since 1998, Tampa Bay's national business image is rising fast -- especially in those regional markets of the country where this metro area focuses its marketing and advertising efforts.

Beneath the survey's rah-rah spin -- characteristic of the Tampa Bay economic booster groups that funded it -- the overall results are still encouraging. For all of this area's well-documented faults -- lousy public education, high crime rates and wimpy household incomes from so-so jobs, to name a few -- the Tampa Bay area's still gaining ground on some of the larger metro areas that compete for relocating and expanding businesses.

The survey's key (if at times euphoric) findings:

Tampa Bay's business image now compares favorably with corporate hot spot Atlanta and even outranks the Georgia city in some key attributes. In 1998, Atlanta's business reputation ruled the entire Southeast.

Tampa Bay has swept by Charlotte, N.C., in business image. In 1998, the two metro areas were roughly on par.

Tampa Bay's business image is closing in on Dallas, perceived as one of the Sunbelt's more dynamic corporate metro areas. In a 1998 national survey, 13 percent of employees said they would consider a move to Dallas. That year, just 2 percent said they would seriously consider Tampa Bay, the lowest ranking behind Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte and Orlando.

Tampa Bay's biggest gains in perception are in the quality of its work force and its relatively low cost of living. Also cited: a sense that Tampa Bay now has growing numbers or clusters of companies in specific industries. That factor -- a key worry in the 1998 survey -- reduces the concern of relocating businesses worried about finding trained workers, and employees afraid there may be no area job alternatives in the event they are laid off.

While clearly bullish, the new survey has a few downsides. Among businesses, Tampa Bay's image fell in the areas of traffic (more congestion) and housing costs (increasingly expensive). And the business community's perception of a relatively high crime rate in this area remained the same in both surveys.

Both the 1998 and new survey were conducted by San Diego's Market Enhancement Group on behalf of the Tampa Bay Partnership and the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce's economic development arm, known as the Committee of 100. Results of the latest survey, involving 300 national and 50 area companies, were made available Tuesday in a morning briefing to the Tampa Bay business community.

For the partnership and chamber groups, the survey results offer two important messages.

First, the image of "Tampa Bay" is strongest in those parts of the country (New York, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta and Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia) where the Tampa Bay Partnership has focused its marketing and ad resources. Partnership chief executive Stuart Rogel says his group (whose slogan is "Tampa Bay, The Climate is Right!") has increased its marketing budget from $570,000 in 1998 to $959,000 last year, so a strengthening "Tampa Bay" perception among U.S. businesses is gratifying.

More important, the survey suggests which sectors of the economy are most likely to turn to the Tampa Bay area for future relocations or expansion.

First, and most obvious, are financial and information companies that were first drawn to the Tampa Bay for its low costs and back-office potential. But the emergence here of large operations by such heavyweight corporations as Citicorp and JPMorgan Chase, among others eager to geographically diversify, is also raising the caliber and pay scale of their job opportunities.

But it begs a question: If Tampa Bay's cost of living rises and becomes less competitive, will the area lose some of its allure to the financial sector? Or can Tampa Bay successfully graduate to attracting better financial jobs?

Second, the survey cites the opportunity to attract and enhance biotech and medical businesses in the area.

Barry Quarles, who conducted the survey at Market Enhancement Group, says a medical facility as reknowned as Tampa's H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center can act as an area magnet to draw as many as 10 smaller but sophisticated medical businesses.

Biotech and medical businesses are less cost-sensitive but more attuned to quality-of-life issues that are already strong or mostly improving in the Tampa Bay area, Quarles says. Among these: weather, beaches and cultural activities.

Yet here's one looming impediment to cultivating biotech: among states, Florida ranks last in the percentage of Ph.D. scientists and engineers in its work force.

Third, the survey says U.S. businesses view Tampa Bay positively for possible port and maritime business expansion.

But what of Tampa Bay's humbler attributes, notably weak education and nastier traffic?

These are relative problems, Quarles says.

None of the major metro areas (Dallas, Atlanta and Charlotte, among them) used as comparisons in the survey offered particularly strong school systems. As for traffic, Quarles (who lives in San Diego) simply asks: Have you driven in Los Angeles, New York or Atlanta lately?

If there was a serious missing link in the survey results, it was high tech.

Before and after that sector's downturn, the Tampa Bay area has spent a lot of its economic development resources trying to cultivate a technology sector. Economic development teams have traveled steadily to Silicon Valley to pitch this area for relocations and expansions. (So has every metro area in America.) And anchored by the University of South Florida and Central Florida, Tampa Bay has linked with Orlando to try and establish a so-called High-Tech Corridor that stretches across traffic-laden I-4.

Progress is slow. The latest survey reinforces the uphill struggle. Few high-tech firms are expanding these days. And those that are do not have the Tampa Bay area high on their list.

In the never-ending race by metro areas to romance U.S businesses, can Tampa Bay's image makers maintain the momentum?

Quarles calls it "selling the "Tampa Bay' brand." If an area has a perceived advantage in the mind of the business community, it must exploit it, he says.

"If you do not put money behind your brand, then you leave the message -- of who you are -- to hearsay," he warns.

That's what Charlotte did. After an ego-inflating ride in the early and mid-1990s that saw Charlotte become the headquarters town of Bank of America and First Union, the metro area lost its focus. The North Carolina city that once said it would be "the next Atlanta" stopped believing in that idea.

"Charlotte has flatlined since 1998," Quarles says.

But isn't pitching the "Tampa Bay" brand bound to become more competitive? More and more midtier metro areas, Milwaukee and Indianapolis among them, are adopting regional marketing efforts and even hiring professional firms to polish their brand names.

Some local leaders grabbed this style of regional marketing before Sept. 11 by promoting their communities as alternatives to big cities.

Now it is a much more central part of the marketing pitch. That leaves Tampa Bay little time to celebrate its survey gains.

-- Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8405.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright