Two years ago on March 14, STLMade, a movement that shines a light on the people and positive stories that make up St. Louis to encourage regional pride and growth, launched with a celebration during Cortex’s weekly Venture Café event. They dubbed it 3.14 Day, a nod to the area code, and broke the attendance record for Venture Café—no, like, all of the Venture Cafés globally. Now under the newish umbrella of Greater St. Louis, Inc., STLMade decided that, this year, one day isn’t enough. It rolled out a whole week called #LoveLocalSTL to encourage St. Louisans to support their favorite local businesses, now through Sunday. Each day has a special carryout theme (today’s is “Cheers, It’s Friday!” and we couldn’t agree more. See our story here for more on the theme days).
So two years on, amid a pandemic, we caught up with Jason Hall, CEO of Greater St. Louis, Inc., to learn more about STLMade’s progress and where the region is heading.
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What was the goal two years ago when you launched STLMade?
When we were launching and looking around at national best practices, one of the things you have to do is manage the reputation and the voice of your region, because it has a huge impact on economic growth. Why does talent choose to be here? Why do businesses want to be here? And St. Louis was in sharp contrast to places like Nashville, Pittsburgh, and Denver, where you see multiple-decade commitments to having a program with a positive, original voice. It doesn’t mean wallpapering over problems, by the way. But you’ve got to lean in with your strengths and curate your story: who you are, what you stand for, what is the place like, who are the people? And so, the goals were to launch that unified narrative to shine a light on positive things. This is not something you solve in one year or two years. But at the time we launched this, the region didn’t even have a chief marketing officer anywhere on these civic platforms. We believe we have a great story to tell, tremendous momentum, amazing people. And that was the goal: Bring the region together, create the tools to be able to tell a story together in a very collaborative way, and really reflect the diversity and the energy of the metro.
How do you know it’s working?
Early on, all these groups were coming together to say we need to do something to pull our resources to tell a better story. As we got deeper into this, though, we assumed that nationally, the reputation of St. Louis was negative. That was our bias going in. But it turned out that the country didn’t even know it was supposed to have an opinion of St. Louis. It was very neutral. We hired a firm that does market research. These were best practice, quantifiable studies that the national perception of St. Louis was highly neutral. We knew we had an opportunity to shape it. And we knew how focus groups across the country responded to facts that they learned about St. Louis. So our rise as an entrepreneurial city? People love that. We had those market insights. But within the metro, we found a region very confused about what its future looked like and a belief that the country viewed us negatively. We had self-criticism. The advisers said, “If you want to have a long-term, clear reputation of what St. Louis is, you have to start locally by building regional pride.”
We hired an emotional psychologist who does research in the metro every six months to really understand what the perception and emotive connection to St. Louis is. We’re seeing those numbers go up. When we started this, the percent of existing residents who would recommend St. Louis as a place to live and work was in the 20s. We are pushing now up into the mid-30s.
Does the message reach those outside St. Louis?
Last year, when we showed up in San Antonio for the world’s largest event for the geospatial industry—where St. Louis is making a big move—people who had once lived in St. Louis, and happened to be at that geospatial event, came up to me and said, “St. Louis was always a region that has kind of struggled to get its act together, but I gotta tell you, you guys look really good down here.”
Did the pandemic change anything?
None of us anticipated that, but you have to adapt. We weren’t doing a lot of festivals and events, but STLMade became the vehicle through which we started talking to the public via PSAs on mask-wearing and social distancing. It’s the tool through which we supported businesses throughout the metro to create signage for wearing masks and those sorts of things. The Blues and the Cardinals, they joined that STLMade campaign encouraging mask-wearing so we could reduce community transmission. Those kinds of things matter—it’s how the region showed up.
How do you see STLMade growing?
So often these types of campaigns only focus on the big names that everyone knows, and I want us to continue to be a grassroots movement that really uncovers what makes this region special and that continues to reflect the full diversity of this community both racially and geographically.
So often, we’ve seen ourselves as the competition, internally, because we’ve become so used to managing decline. That cannot be our mindset if we’re going to reach our full potential and grow. Success is when every resident in this region, no matter what ZIP code he or she is born into, sees opportunity and success is within their reach.
