Stop competing, start growing
I have driven through enough small towns sitting fifteen minutes apart to notice the same thing every time. Each one has its own downtown, its own festival, its own chamber of commerce chasing the same handful of tourist dollars and the same handful of new businesses. And each one, without meaning to, is quietly competing against its neighbor for a prize that neither of them can win alone. Having worked with and consulted with so many communities across the country, this trap is not uncommon, in fact, it is quite common.
That instinct to compete is understandable. Every local leader wants their town to be the one people talk about. But a growing body of research on rural tourism and regional branding says the towns that win are not the ones that out hustle their neighbors. They are the ones that stop treating the town three exits down as a rival and start treating it as a teammate.
A Purdue University study on tourism branding found that rural communities often think far too small when they market themselves. Even a single county, the research found, is usually too small a unit for visitors to really care about. Regional branding across four or five counties, built around shared attractions, produced a stronger and more favorable image in visitors’ minds than any single town could create on its own, and it drew more inquiries and more actual visits. In plain terms, the water really does rise faster when more boats are tied together.
Tourism marketers have a name for this. They call it co-opetition, cooperating with the towns you would normally see as competition to build something none of you could build alone. When several communities pool their marketing budgets, they can afford a real website, real advertising, and a real presence at travel shows instead of a single flyer at the welcome center. When several chambers promote the same regional brand, every one of their social media pages, newsletters, and front desks becomes a megaphone for the whole area instead of just
one town.
This is not a theory. The Finger Lakes Regional Tourism Council in New York represents fourteen separate county tourism agencies under one shared regional voice, and it has built a reputation strong enough to draw visitors who never would have found any one of those counties on their own. In Australia, three neighboring councils and the villages around them recently launched a single joint tourism brand, choosing to be found together as one destination instead of splitting the same visitors three ways.
None of this requires every community to want the same thing. That is where a lot of regional efforts stall before they start, because one town wants growth and new rooftops and a busier Main Street, while the town next door wants to protect the quiet and the scenery that make it special in the first place. Those are not competing goals. They are complementary ones, if the region is willing to let each place play its own part.
Think of it the way a scenic byway or a wine trail works. Nobody expects every stop on the trail to offer the same experience. One town is where you eat and shop. The next is where you slow down and watch the river. Visitors do not pick one stop and skip the rest. They follow the whole loop, and every town on it benefits from the pull of the others, even the ones doing nothing more than staying exactly as peaceful as they already are.
That only works if the towns talk to each other first. Not about merging identities, but about which role each one is best suited to play, and how to tell one clear story about the region instead of four competing ones. The town chasing growth still gets its new visitors and new businesses. The town protecting its quiet still gets to stay quiet. Neither one has to give up what it wants, because the region, not any single town, is what is actually being marketed.
If you serve on a chamber, a tourism board, or a city council, here is something you can do before the day is out. Call a counterpart in a neighboring community, not a competitor down the street from you, but a leader in the next town over, and ask a single question: what if we told our story together instead of separately. You do not need a grant or a consultant to start that conversation. You just need to be willing to have it.
Rising water does raise all the ships. But somebody still must tie the boats together first.
John A. Newby, a Chamber CEO, Publisher & Media Executive, Business Owner, Consultant, and International Speaker is the author of the “Building Main Street, Not Wall Street” a column dedicated to helping local businesses & communities build stronger foundations allowing them to thrive in a world where local is lost to Wall Street interests. His email is john@truly-local.org
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