Southern New England states see tourism link

RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT: A paddler on the Blackstone River canal in a 2011 photo. Robert Billington, president of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council, is looking to create a greater connection among southern New England tourism assets. / COURTESY CHERYL THOMPSON
RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT: A paddler on the Blackstone River canal in a 2011 photo. Robert Billington, president of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council, is looking to create a greater connection among southern New England tourism assets. / COURTESY CHERYL THOMPSON

It sounds like the latest up-and-coming neighborhood in a real estate magazine, but SoNew is in fact the new moniker for southern New England coined by local tourism leaders hoping it will attract more visitors to the region.
“We have been kicking around this idea of southern New England for several years now and are trying to bring together the organizations of the three states to imprint this concept,” said Robert Billington, president of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council and one of the principals behind the Southern New England branding effort.
“Northern New England has always worked well together, but southern New England has the most to gain,” Billington said. “Most visitors are not coming into the region through Boston, but are coming in from New York, so we are in an excellent position to catch them.”
In an example of SoNew regional thinking, Billington has expanded the range of the annual tours Blackstone Valley has run for a decade, which used to be Tour Rhode Island, to reach outside the state’s borders. They are now called Southern New England Discovery Tours.
In the group’s tours that took place in early May, itineraries included not only the Blackstone Valley, Providence’s Independence Trail and Taylor Swift’s mansion in Westerly, but Mystic and Putnam, Conn., and Worcester, Mass. They started from the parking lot at Twin River Casino in Lincoln.
The response was overwhelmingly positive, Billington said, and future tours should expand further outside Rhode Island with separate starting points in each state.
If successful, SoNew will encourage visitors from the south and west to stop and explore some of the lesser-known sites in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts instead of heading straight for the mountains and foliage of the northern states. Billington said it was an idea tried in the 1970s with the Americana Trail, which focused on the area between Mystic and Cape Cod but died out more than a decade ago.
The tours are only one example of where tourism leaders hope the SoNew effort will eventually lead.
The term “SoNew” was the creation of Matt Caspari, a partner in advertising agency Caspari McCormick of Delaware, which promotes the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut.
In the spirit of knitting the region’s marketing efforts together, Caspari toured the Blackstone Valley and thought the whole three-state area had enough destinations within a small area that they could be effectively marketed together, Billington said.
Although Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut compete for tourists within the Northeast, they already work together and contribute state funds to draw international visitors through the Discover New England organization.
Discover New England operates on the premise that potential visitors in England, Germany and Japan may not know what Rhode Island is, but know New England and are interested in visiting it as a region.
The target of a SoNew campaign would be the long-distance, domestic market in parts of the United States like California, Florida and Texas who would be at least somewhat familiar with the differences between the different parts of New England.
“This [idea] was thought of in terms of long-distance domestic: folks who come here and are familiar with fall foliage and beaches, but do not see borders,” said R.I. Tourism Director Mark Brodeur. “This is really being driven out of the major southern New England destinations, like Plymouth, Newport and Mystic, which are partnering together to see what can they do.” With SoNew marketing still in the infant stages, none of the region’s state tourism offices has signed on yet.
Rhode Island’s tiny state tourism budget isn’t likely to be a huge factor in funding a national advertising campaign, but Brodeur said he will continue to help facilitate discussions between the states and different industry players.
“The important part of branding is what the consumer is saying of us, not what we are saying to the consumer,” Brodeur said. “We are not creating something that doesn’t exist – long-distance visitors are already going to an average of two-and-a-half states.”
Although the SoNew movement brings to mind the coastal areas from eastern Connecticut to Cape Cod, Brodeur said Boston and all of Massachusetts will be included.
On his end, Billington will continue to expand Southern New England Discovery Tours into areas like the Massachusetts SouthCoast and further west in Connecticut.
So far, there are no plans for a paid SoNew advertising campaign. Billington said the idea will need to catch on among residents of the region before it makes any sense to invest precious resources in it.
“SoNew is building collaboration and building what we want to do internally,” Billington said. “We have to build it ourselves first before we can pay one penny in advertising. Our theory is that there is a place called southern New England, but people have to feel there is such a place and it’s more than just a phrase.” •

No posts to display