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Regional Image Campaign gets down to business

The latest phase of the North East’s regional image campaign, ‘Passionate people. Passionate places’ is aiming to promote the region as a destination for business from across the globe.

Regional Development Agency One NorthEast previewed the next stage of its drive to improve perceptions of the region to attract investment and skilled people last week.

This year’s business message is a response to consultation including over 400 companies and individuals from right across the region and research among business people in the UK. This feedback showed that while awareness of the region’s tourism and quality of life assets were well known, a significant proportion of opinion formers have a limited knowledge of the North East economic and business infrastructure.

Margaret Fay, Chairman of One NorthEast said: “The ‘Passionate people. Passionate places’ campaign has successfully promoted North East England’s best assets across the world. Our aim with the next stage is to focus on North East England’s business strengths and create an environment that supports our business community.”

The £3m campaign will include a series of advertisements starting at the end of September in national newspapers, and a number of business figures are already lending their support to the initiative.

David Still, Managing Director, Clipper Windpower Europe said: “Clipper is a world wide company; our main engineering base is in California, at Santa Barbara. I am selling North East England as the best location for the company to develop our turbines. Encouraging my Californian colleagues to come and work with me here in Blyth is not a hard sell.”

Louise Allcroft, Chief Executive, Complement Genomics a hi-tech DNA testing business said: “I’ve come up here and I’ve fallen in love with the region, so I’d be very honoured to think that people think highly enough of our business that we can go out and speak about how great the region is, and hopefully we’re representing the region in a very positive way.

“It’s not just about bringing in tourism, it’s about the entire North East, whether it’s the business community, educational establishments or whether its tourism, we are one North East and we should all band together and promote ourselves.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .