Spin Control vs. Bad Surveys : Slogan or No Slogan, Region Has Much to Offer Business

Is there a dollar-and-cents payoff from self-esteem? Southern California may soon find out, now that the New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership has kicked off an image-repair campaign with the slogan “Together we’re the best. Los Angeles.”

The idea behind the $4.5-million effort--funded by cities, the county and private businesses--is to help local people feel better about the region’s strengths by giving them facts about leadership in entertainment, international trade and other industries.

After the word sinks in, Southern Californians traveling elsewhere will be able to answer jibes about Los Angeles or, more seriously, arguments designed to lure business away from this region.

Most folks need a booster shot. After years of recession and other setbacks, many people living here are unaware of the region’s advantages. And slipshod magazine surveys, fed by firms that make a living relocating businesses, wrongly underrate the Los Angeles area.

For example, this region has the highest concentration of engineers, scientists, mathematicians and skilled technicians in the United States, yet Forbes ran a survey by a Newport, R.I., marketing company that ranked Los Angeles low as a good place for information industry, and Fortune ran a survey by a New York consulting firm that ranked Los Angeles behind most other cities as a place of knowledge workers.

That’s not to mention Fortune’s recent blooper in which the nation’s leading center for trade with Asia and Latin America, and its largest commercial port, ran out of the money as a place for international business.

Such surveys are full of holes, but they chip away at an area’s image, which can mean real money in tourism, commercial real estate and business development.

So it’s OK to remind ourselves that Los Angeles has a lot to offer as long as we also acknowledge that the area has a lot of improvements to work on.

But we shouldn’t stop at slogans--especially this clunky slogan, in which Los An-ge- less is mispronounced to rhyme with best . Worse, the Los Angeles partnership openly models its effort on New York, which introduced Big Apples and “I New York” baby talk in the 1970s when that once-proud city was in decline.

The slogan hasn’t helped. New York state and city have been losing jobs for decades and the city even now may be sliding back into the same municipal bankruptcy that scuppered it in 1975.

Fact is, what really makes a city great are jobs and opportunities, and in that respect Los Angeles is a beehive. There are 168 companies expanding in this area, reports the county’s Economic Development Corp.

And the exodus of the early ‘90s, when firms decamped to greener grass, has slowed considerably and in some cases is reversing itself. “We’re getting inquiries from companies that moved to other states,” says Barry Sedlik, manager of business retention for Southern California Edison.

But that’s not to blink at problems. “Most companies here find they have to do too much training, too much remedial reading and writing when they hire someone,” says a top banking executive.

Education and the skills of the local work force are critical factors when companies decide to expand or relocate operations, says Charles Galloway of Moran, Stahl & Boyer, a New York consulting firm. “They want to know about the ability to hire and recruit people.”

That’s especially true in service businesses, where people are all-important, says Regina Connell of PHH Fantus Consulting, a Chicago-based company that advises corporations on relocating and cities on policies to attract them. “Business likes to see a lot of training in an area,” says Connell.

A current favorite among the consulting set is Atlanta, which has an aggressive program--led by former President Jimmy Carter--to redeem neighborhoods by training youngsters. That reflects a tradition of several decades in which once-poor Southern states have trained labor to attract business investment.

But somebody’s missing something here. Efforts to train skilled labor in the Southeast have to pale before the availability of technical skills and training in Southern California. In addition to numerous Private Industry Councils, backed by the federal government, and the State Employment Training Panel office in North Hollywood, there are community colleges throughout the five-county area that train tens of thousands of people for all sorts of work.

Los Angeles Trade/Technical College, for example, trains 13,000 students in construction, food service, apparel and other trades. Training is up-to-date: “For mechanical repair of any kind these days, we train for programmable electronic controls,” says Hilda Tomberlin, dean of Trade/Tech.

“We customize training also,” explains Tomberlin. “We meet with potential employers and offer special training to suit their needs.”

The school and others like it are resources for the area in the long aftermath of aerospace, when local unemployment remains higher than the national average. And they are bulwarks against companies locating plants elsewhere. Even now Fantus is talking relocation with several companies, says Connell.

Not to panic, says Sedlik of SCE. “Companies constantly study other pastures. But they often find they can’t get the skilled help we have here.”

That’s a good story. Maybe the New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership should emphasize training and skills in its campaign. Maybe it could simplify its slogan to “Los Angeles, the Region That Works.”

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L.A.’s Image

Although Los Angeles is on the road to recovery from recession, fires, riots and earthquakes, the city gets mixed reviews in many magazine and corporate surveys. While several portray it as unfriendly toward business, others disagree. Some examples:

Best for Business

Fortune magazine’s annual survey of the best cities for business worldwide does not cite Los Angeles in the Top 10, but it does list it alphabetically as one of 50 additional contenders: Rank / City: 1. Hong Kong 2. New York 3. London 4. Atlanta 5. Chicago 6. Singapore 7. Toronto 8. San Francisco 9. Frankfurt, Germany 10. Miami

‘Smart’ Cities

Los Angeles ranks 17th out of 100 areas polled in a Forbes survey of the best places for “smart” companies in the United States: Rank / City: 1. Salt Lake City 2. Houston 3. Dallas 4. Denver 5. Portland, Ore. 6. Seattle 7. Phoenix 8. Minneapolis-St. Paul 9. Omaha 10. San Francisco 17. Los Angeles

Best for Latinos

Because of Latinos’ lack of political clout and the relatively high cost of doing business, Los Angeles ranked 10th in a recent survey of the top 50 U.S. cities for Latino business opportunities: Rank / City: 1. Chicago 2. Phoenix 3. Albuquerque, N.M. 4. Miami 5. San Antonio 6. Houston 7. Dallas 8. El Paso 9. Austin, Tex. 10. Los Angeles

Good Living

Although it dropped eight places from 1993, Los Angeles still falls in the top 25% of the 300 best places to live in America, according to the 1994 annual survey by Money magazine: Rank / City: 1. Raleigh-Durham, N.C. 2. Rochester, Minn. 3. Provo-Orem, Utah 4. Salt Lake City-Ogden 5. San Jose 6. Stamford-Norwalk, Conn. 7. Gainesville, Fla. 8. Seattle 9. Sioux Falls, S.D. 10. Albuquerque, N.M. 66. Los Angeles

Sources: Forbes; Fortune; Hispanic Business Magazine; Money; Times reports

Researched by JENNIFER OLDHAM / Los Angeles Times