Rock Hill marketing strategy coming to a billboard near you

The next time you’re on Interstate 77 fighting traffic to get to your job on the other side of the state line, Rock Hill may give you a slight nudge to direct your career in another direction.

Sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, you might look up and see a billboard reminder of what you’re missing back home – “You Could Have Hit Snooze,” “You Could Have Finished Your Coffee” – with the address of a planned jobs page on the city’s Knowledge Park website.

The billboards are part of a renewed marketing strategy by the Rock Hill Economic Development Corp. to attract more high-tech businesses to the city, bringing jobs and the workers to fill them – including those who already live here and commute.

Cathy Murphy, Rock Hill’s downtown development manager, told the RHEDC’s monthly meeting the billboards will form part of a larger strategy economic developers are creating to promote the city as a technological and knowledge-economy hub.

The group is also planning a GPS-style “recalculating” ad that would direct the driver back to a “talented job.” Another billboard for the southbound lanes features a dog looking wistfully out the window and the tag line “You Could Be Home By Now.”

Murphy told members of the RHEDC the ad campaign is the result of a year-long review of the city’s branding and marketing strategy they hope will give Rock Hill a “fresh, clear” image.

“It’s frustrating to try to communicate what we know Rock Hill to be to other companies, and get them to see Rock Hill as we see it,” Murphy said.

So the group worked with marketing consultants to come up with the campaign, including a new slogan, “Connecting Bright Minds and Big Ideas,” and even a proposed new logo, which has yet to be approved by the RHEDC board.

The new logo has a similar design and color scheme to the logos for Knowledge Park and the Technology Incubator, two big branding efforts for Rock Hill’s downtown business district.

The new strategy will leverage Rock Hill’s proximity to Charlotte, but focus on the area’s unique attributes, telling “the Rock Hill story” in a way that will “honor our textile past but shift the primary focus of the brand to the future of Rock Hill and innovation,” Murphy said.

“With some of the area’s brightest minds and most passionate visionaries, Rock Hill is quickly establishing itself as the regional center for technology and creativity,” is how Murphy summarized the area’s “brand position.”

The proposal received a positive reaction from RHEDC members at Tuesday’s meeting. “It ties in with what we’ve already invested in with Knowledge Park,” said board member Jason Broadwater.

RHEDC sees the new branding strategy as a way to emphasize the newly unveiled University Center concept for the city’s former textile district, and the work of the area’s Technology Incubator to develop new technology-oriented businesses.

“We’re getting into corporation-building,” said Technology Incubator director David Warner, “which we haven’t done before.”

This story was originally published June 7, 2016 at 6:18 PM with the headline "Rock Hill marketing strategy coming to a billboard near you."