Friday, March 29, 2024
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Clear-eyed Optimism

By M+E Staff

On Tuesday, the New York Times ran an above-the-fold front-page feature on Detroit, depicting its current fortunes as a tale of two cities: both desolate and deprived, yet economically revitalizing and growing several key sectors. (As an aside, I long for the story on Detroit that avoids the word “grit.”)

Meanwhile, Travel Michigan is launching an international Pure Michigan advertising campaign to lure foreign visitors to our state, along with its largest-ever national campaign. There’s good reason to believe those efforts will be money well spent: Pure Michigan’s website is the most-visited state travel site in the country for the sixth year in a row, and Pure Michigan’s first national campaign paid off in increased travel spending in Michigan by out-of-state visitors.

Last week I wrote and edited profiles of our 2013 Hall of Fame inductees. A common piece of advice they shared with their peers was to be honest with their clients – to not overpromise.

So how do we integrate our state’s reality with our efforts to sell it to others? Traverse City is a long way from Detroit. But Detroit is our state’s largest city, and its fate, in many regards, will be all of ours. We can’t overpromise – we can’t pretend like the city isn’t plagued by crime and poor services, even as we can proudly point to an outstanding cultural district, thriving restaurants, gleaming new hotels and a beautiful riverfront. We can’t avoid the reality that our state was one of very few to lose population in the last census, as residents sought opportunity elsewhere in the country, even as we know we have lakes and resorts and museums that draw visitors from around the globe.

Clear-eyed optimism and collective effort – an awareness that we’re all in it together, like it or not – seems like the best way forward for Michigan. Snyder isn’t known for throwing money down a black hole, so the state clearly feels it’s making a good bet by marketing it to outsiders. And the businessowners thriving in Detroit might care about their city, but they’re not going to make a bad investment for the sake of an ideal. We may have a long way to go, but we’re going there.

 

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