Nashville’s New Melody Means Business

After years of fine-tuning its “Music City USA” image, city officials and business leaders now are hoping to add “Corporate City USA” to Nashville’s repertoire.

They have embarked on a 4-year, $6-million campaign to promote Nashville as a hotbed of economic activity, with good schools, a willing work force and an airline hub.

The goal: to add 40,000 jobs, expand the market for goods and services by $1.7 billion and record $4 billion in real estate construction in the eight-county Nashville metropolitan region.

Nashville’s boosters admit their campaign, dubbed “Partnership 2000,” is on the ambitious side.

“What you basically have is recognition of Nashville as a country music source, but little else,” explained market researcher Mark Wright, of Signa Strategic Marketing Services in Nashville. “The Music City USA brand is one of the strongest recognizable brands in the nation.”

While name recognition may help politicians, it’s not enough for business recruiters, experts say.

Among Nashville’s problems is competition from Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C.--the South’s current hot spots for business activity. Atlanta is home to nine Fortune 500 companies; Charlotte has one. Nashville has none.

“People could name a lot of relevant business associations with the Atlantas and the Charlottes of the world but could name no relevant associations with Nashville,” Wright said.

But Wright notes Nashville’s potential. The city showed up as one of the top emerging markets, among the second tier of U.S. cities, in Cushman & Wakefield’s annual business survey released last October.

The survey of 400 business executives placed Nashville on par with cities such as Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Orlando, Fla.; Indianapolis; Memphis, Tenn., and Jacksonville, Fla., in terms of desirability for locating a business. Seattle topped the list.

In addition to competing with other cities, Nashville’s business recruiters have had to overcome some negative publicity surrounding the mayor’s engagement last summer to a nightclub singer while he was still married to his second wife.

Kate McEnroe, director of office location consulting for PHH Fantus Corp. in Chicago, said that kind of bad publicity isn’t likely to seriously damage Nashville’s image.

Relocation consultants meeting in New York with lawyer Thomas Sherrard, who heads up Partnership 2000, also concluded that the romantic escapades weren’t seriously damaging, particularly when looking at the city’s ability to attract major league sports.

“I think those people realize there’s more than the mayor here. We’ve got a metropolitan form of government rather than little fiefdoms,” Sherrard said.

Nashville’s business leaders and politicians want to keep the city’s home of the Grand Ole Opry recognition, which has attracted tourists and music-related businesses, and parlay that into something more--just as the state of Tennessee has.

Tennessee has landed General Motors Corp.’s $1.9-billion Saturn plant, a $500-million Nissan engine plant and other big fish.

Nashville’s Partnership 2000 campaign has included a series of magazine advertisements.

An October ad in Fortune magazine, for instance, contained a testimonial from the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche, which moved its national financial center from the World Trade Center in New York to a vacant insurance building in Nashville.

Sherrard said he was told by Fortune representatives not to expect a large response from the initial ad. “They said Nashville didn’t have a brand yet. They said not to expect much until there’s a level of awareness.”

But Sherrard said the magazine received 555 requests for more information about Nashville by the end of November alone.