Many of our members attended this morning’s ‘Great Nottingham Debate 2014’ organised by the Nottingham Post in conjunction with the Nottingham Business School and at which speakers who included Sir John Peace, Mike Sassi the Editor of The Post, Professor Edward Peck from Nottingham Trent University, Professor Chris Rudd from The University of Nottingham and Ken Murphy the MD of health and beauty international and brands at Alliance Boots.
All spoke and commented on a benchmarking study produced by the Nottingham Business School on the economy and labour market of Nottingham. The speakers were joined by Richard Baker, business editor of The Post and Ian Curryer chief executive of Nottingham City Council for a question and answer session within which I was able to say a few words on behalf of NMB. My firm Geldards LLP was one of the event sponsors.
The study contains much benchmarking information which will undoubtedly help inform decisions taken locally going forwards about how Nottingham is positioned against UK and European competitor cities and what steps we need to take to address areas in which we might be seen as uncompetitive e.g. truly world class locally based international transport links for business travellers.
However, one key message to come out of the debate was that the questions how and by what means Nottingham markets itself remain unanswered. As I said at the debate, much work is being undertaken at present to bring together place marketing for our local economic area, something which NMB has been promoting for two years and it is to be hoped that within six months our city and local partners will have in place an effective mechanism for selling Nottingham and Nottinghamshire.
How we sell and by reference to what messages is another question entirely. We cannot be all things to all people and we must remember going forwards that selling our city effectively does not mean telling everyone we can about everything we do here or about everything we are good at, but is about picking a small number of hard-hitting and effective messages by which we can promote Nottingham, and sticking with them. I do not believe that our selling messages should focus on cheapness, which might be subsidiary to our main messages, or that as a city we should be self-conscious about our size and position in the world. Our real messages might focus on cultural identity, or areas where genuinely world class work is done here and I do not believe we should be shy about pushing out messages which focus on quality and which identify where within Nottingham and our local economic area we can genuinely say that we lead.