Chamber woos ex-residents

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Nov 22, 2008 - Page: 1D - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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In January, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber will go after former Baton Rouge residents in major metropolitan centers of the South in a bid to bring back some of the state’s best and brightest.

A $100,000 campaign, funded by businesses and possibly the state, will carry the “Welcome Back to Baton Rouge” theme through outdoor advertising and targeted business and specialty magazines.

It’s not associated formally with the Baton Rouge Area Foundation’s Creative Corridor campaign for branding the Interstate 10 and Interstate 12 corridor. But the chamber campaign does seek a similar result, BRAC’s Adam Knapp said: bringing back young but seasoned workers to a Baton Rouge region that’s changed much for the better in the past decade.

“We have envisioned a program for marketing our available jobs in these areas where our college graduates are most dense, which is Houston, Dallas and Atlanta, and we’ll be launching a program along those lines,” said Knapp, the chamber’s chief executive officer.

In the Milken Institute’s Best-Performing Cities 2008 ranking, Baton Rouge scored 40th out of 200 large metro areas, but it ranked 169th for its concentration of high-tech economic output. Its growth in that sector for the past five years, however, ranks 46th out of the 200 cities.

Telling Baton Rouge’s story of growth in such sectors will win people back to Baton Rouge and win others to the city for the first time, especially when quality of life advantages are included, Knapp said.

The chamber is applying the same strategy to woo high-growth companies that can help diversify the regional Baton Rouge economy.

“We already have a lot of dynamic companies that are here,” he said. “When we talk about LSU and when we talk about Pennington (Biomedical Research Center), all of that relates to this high-growth strategy in which we can attract people to exciting, high-wage careers. We need to heavily focus on retaining and attracting what (Richard) Florida calls the creative catalysts: You can call them creative catalysts or thirty-somethings, the economic strategy is what you would need to lay out as a region to attract them.”

In the new “Welcome Back to Baton Rouge” campaign, BRAC will conduct a marketing campaign in Houston, Dallas and Atlanta for three months and follow that up with special events in the cities.

A conservative count places 20,000 LSU and Southern University alumni in those cities, and that doesn’t include graduates of Southeastern Louisiana University or the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said Mike Odom, BRAC’s vice president of marketing.

The chamber campaign will target a more narrow window than the broad BRAF corridor marketing effort.

Beginning in January, the chamber will seek to interest people with seven to 12 years of work, including management backgrounds, people who already have started families and people who may not have been considering taking their careers and families to Baton Rouge but who’ll listen to that possibility.

The campaign will drive those candidates to a Web site that taps them into the current state of Baton Rouge possibilities, including job opportunities and resources for trailing spouses making a move.