Ireland marches on in sport and on Twitter

It’s been a good week for Ireland. Down in New Zealand the country’s rugby football team finds itself on top of its group and comfortably on the way to the knock out stages of the Rugby World Cup. Ireland has been punching well above its weight on the international rugby field for nearly a decade now.* Even the shock of the country’s devastating economic collapse has failed to dent the skill, artistry and tenacity of its rugby athletes. Nor do those same qualities appear to have deserted the Irish Development Agency, which this week announced that Twitter is to open an international operations centre in Dublin (the announcement was made on Twitter, of course).

Twitter will join other new media giants that have fallen for Ireland’s charms. They include Google, which has some 2,000 staff in Ireland, Pay Pal, Facebook, Electronic Arts, Zynga and Linkedin.

Ireland’s corporation tax of 12.5% is certainly a big attraction.  It is of course English-speaking, has well educated people and, following its economic troubles, has a very competitive economy in wages, office space and high quality housing. All of this makes Ireland hard to resist for any business with international markets seeking a competitive cost base, good people and good connections. But Ireland has something else. It’s an asset that adds lustre and value to the hard and demanding businesses of FDI. The Irish know how to make life fun.

Many years ago, when I was running an inward investment office in London on behalf of five development agencies in Scotland, it was always a great thrill to get an invitation to the IDA’s St Patrick’s Day party at its office in upmarket Bond St. It was the best party in town and always packed with London’s elite from business, financial, media and diplomatic circles. Everyone was made warmly welcome, a glass was never allowed to stay empty and IDA staff worked tirelessly to help guests make new friends and contacts. Running a great party in a commercial environment is not easy. Hospitality can seem forced and the hosts are often nervous about potential cultural gaffes or upsetting somebody who might have an inflated view of their own importance. The Irish by-passed all such fears by running a business party in exactly the same way as they would a party in an Irish home. In Ireland, a home is a place that wants to make visitors and strangers feel completely at home and entirely welcome and comfortable. We’re not bad at this in my native Scotland and the Welsh are no slackers either, but the Irish are masterful.

If the IDA’s work starts with a big welcome and wonderful hospitality, it’s nursing of an FDI opportunity leaves little to be desired. Like all the very best IPAs (again the Scots and the Welsh stand out, as do the Maltese and the Finns) the IDA professionals nurture and champion every opportunity; guiding a company through the labyrinth, shifting barriers out of the way, easing paths, opening doors, staying in touch, responding at speed; at every step giving the investor more and more confidence that they’ll make the right choice in choosing Ireland. The growth figures for the UK and most of Europe make pretty grim reading at present, but Ireland is growing. It’s modest growth right now, but the IDA is showing how vital a blue chip IPA is to economic recovery and to building for the future.

*For those of you not familiar with Rugby Football, I should explain that the Irish international side is made up of players from the Republic of Ireland and from Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK. The IDA on the other hand represents only the Republic of Ireland.

Go Topeka – chocolate success and web site energy

I have never been to Topeka, Kansas. In fact, the only times in my life the city’s name has come to my attention is when I’ve occasionally heard the song “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” which comes from a musical of 1946. The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe in the song was a famous pioneering railroad company, though the name sadly disappeared in a merger in 1996. So, when a banner ad promoting Topeka popped up on an e-mail from the US publication, Site Selection International, I thought about how often I’d heard that song but knew nothing of the place, so I decided to click through to the website of GoTopeka, which describes itself as an “Economic Partnership.”

GoTopeka website

Now, I’ve looked at hundreds and hundreds of FDI, economic development and city promotion websites since the World Wide Web first became a serious marketing tool. I’ve written a few sites and advised on strategy, structure and content for many more. The best sites follow the rules of good newspaper design (the things I first learned in newsrooms 35 years ago still count) - a strong “lead story,” good headlines that tempt the reader to find out more and a variety of stories so there’s something for a range of interests. Most importantly, there’s always good use of white space to help make headlines and pictures stand out and arrest attention.

So, how did I rate Go Topeka’s web site? 8 out of ten, I’d say. It’s clean, sharp, bright, interesting and informative. It makes good and creative use of a recent success in attracting the Mars chocolate business to the city. Mars will spend an initial $250 million building a plant to make some of the world’s biggest confectionery brands. 200 people will be hired; a brilliant success for Topeka.

Congratulations are due for giving the e-mail addresses of senior staff. Data capturing e-mail forms have their uses, but nothing beats having contact with a real live human being that you can address by name. If you ask me to deal with a named person I feel more welcome. I feel I’m being treated with dignity and not simply as an anonymous stranger.

Could the site be improved? Well, here are a few thoughts:

• Rather than only a press release on the Mars success, I’d like to read detail on how Go Topeka attracted Mars in the first place and what it did to convince the business to locate in Topeka. That’s the sort of real practical information on benefits that executives with mobile projects want to know.
• Think about a music ident; a snatch of music that makes the site come a little more alive when first visited. Just a few bars of“On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” would do it.
• The web as we know it is changing fast and within a very short time sites with TV content will dominate the web. What an opportunity for us to watch the progress of the creation of a chocolate plant. Willie Wonka eat your heart out.

As we all know, there is not a lot of good economic news around the world at present, so it makes the heart beat a little faster to come across an organization like Go Topeka. It transmits those vital qualities of enthusiasm, infectious energy and professionalism. Enthusiasm, energy and professionalism are three of the essential elements needed to take the world back to confidence and growth.

New business empires bring FDI gifts to old imperial masters

Last week, The Economist – surely the single most influential publication in the business world – reported on the growing trend of big corporations from the emerging nations to invest inthe established Western economies, mainly by buying companies. Britain says the paper, is particularly attractive because there are few barriers to buying British companies and the country has many of the world’s best legal, accountancy and marketing brains, plus the City of London offers immensely valuable expertise and experience alongside its access to vast amounts of capital. British companies have gone under the hammer to corporations from Mexico, Thailand, Singapore and, most notably, India. Indeed India’s Tata is now the UK’s biggest manufacturing employer, with a pay roll of some 40,000 people.

The Economist cites Pankaj Ghemawat, the Harvard guru of globalisation (and author of the recent book, World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It*) who argues that many of the new southern hemisphere business giants will favour flexing their global muscles by putting FDI into countries that were once their European imperial masters. Britain, which had the world’s biggest empire, could do very nicely if the Tata experience is repeated and big businesses from former colonies buy into the UK, through either purchase or greenfield investment. So too could France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal, all of which had substantial imperial possessions. My bet is on the UK doing best for the reasons given above, but also because its current coalition government is dominated by Conservative Party believers in free market economics, deregulation and conditions that promote maximum flexibility in the labour market. Having the freedom to further deregulate the labour market is one of the reasons why many on the British Right want to greatly reduce the UK’s ties with the EU, which has championed employee rights for decades. The EU is holding back Britain’s ability to compete is the argument of the anti-EU lobby, though they usually chose to side-step the fact that 40% of the UK’s trade is with EU nations. Loosening Britain’s ties with the EU at a time of massive economic instability seems rash and dangerous to many business leaders who employ millions of British workers and profit handsomely from trade with the EU.

During the 1990s the Conservative Party got close to destroying itself over the issue of EU involvement and the rifts that the argument created helped the party lose three general elections in a row between 1997 and 2010. In the years since then most of the senior Conservatives on the pro-EU wing have retired or died. Today it is a party overwhelmingly averse to the EU and it is only the presence of the pro-EU Liberal Democrats in the coalition that is preventing some senior Conservative ministers speaking out in support of the Euro sceptics. The issue of Europe has the potential to break up the coalition, though a more likely outcome is a compromise that sees Britain finding a way to reform its labour laws and regulations without loosening its bonds with the EU.

Further labour deregulation could open the floodgates to FDI from old imperial possessions, an irony that will not be lost on the British Left or the Trade Union movement, both of which for most of the 20^th century implacably opposed imperialism and the exploitation of cheap colonial labour. In the old empires it was control of the seas that mattered. Today it’s simply economic muscle that calls the shots and it’s the South that’s growing stronger daily. Whether domination by economic interests from Mumbai or Beijing is more comfortable for Britain than shared sovereignty with European neighbours is a question that perhaps only time can answer.

*World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It is available on Amazon and through good booksellers.

Welcome to Martin Roche's Etoile blog

Welcome to the first of my blogs, which will be published whenever I think I have something useful to say. The core idea of the blog is to stimulate ideas, thoughts and opinions about economic development in its widest sense.

Some days I might discuss organisational structure. On another day it might be macro economic policy, or SME development, or the role of the Arts and culture, or how to communicate better in a globalised world. In short, I’ll write about things that interest me and are relevant to economic development professionals all over the globe. Please give me your feedback. Without feedback there’s no real point in a public blog and without feedback there’s no real sharing of ideas and experiences.

I’ve been involved in economic development for over 30 years and advised agencies across the world. Most of my time has been spent helping national, regional and local government agencies communicate more effectively with all their audiences, but I was a case officer and unit director before specialising in communications.

For me, economic development has two great attractions. First and most importantly it has the fundamental purpose of trying to make life better for people. I’ve always got a great deal of satisfaction whenever a project I’ve been involved with brought new investment, new jobs and new opportunities, whether in manufacturing, financial services, retail, hospitality, culture, the Arts or tourism. Actually, satisfaction is not an adequate word to describe the buzz of adrenalin from being part of success. It’s more like the feeling you get when you score the winning points at sport.

The second great attraction for me is that economic development is where politics meets economics and where business meets the public sector; it’s where people who make things happen come together to achieve good things.

Basic rules of communications to attract investment

Too often the good that IPAs do is not well enough understood. Some are quite simply brilliant at promoting themselves and their territory. Sadly, though, there are too many that don’t have a sound understanding of the communications process.

So, I’m going to launch my blog with some absolutely basic rules of communications.

1. If you want people to listen to you then you have to get their attention.
2. If you want people to hear what you have to say you have to be interesting and relevant.
3. If you want to be interesting and relevant you have to be creative and never be boring.
4. If you want people to believe what you say you have to give them reasons to believe you.
5. If you want to defeat the competition you have to be smarter, faster, more interesting and more original.
6. If you want people to the think you are the right people to do business with you have to be credible, trusted, efficient and welcoming.

• If you want people to invest their money in your country then get the best possible communications advisers you can afford.
• If you want to win the jobs and benefits of FDI you can’t afford to be average, you can’t afford to be dull. You can’t afford to be boring.
• If you represent a great country, or region or city, with great people and great opportunities then be excited about your benefits – because if you’re not excited, enthusiastic, interesting, stimulating and different the investor will probably go to another country, or region or city.