‘Corridor’ tag rises in popularity for business names

A sampling of businesses from around North Liberty and Cedar Rapids with the word “Corridor” in their name. PHOTOS KAITLIN RIGGLE

 

By Dave DeWitte
dave@corridorbusiness.com

Although many people still can’t identify the Creative Corridor outside its seven-county region, the area’s brand is becoming so well known that companies are using it within their own names in growing numbers.

Some 203 entities had incorporated as “Corridor,” or used it as a fictitious name, according to Iowa state records as of July 28. That’s up from fewer than 100 as of 10 years ago this month.

Of the 203 companies with the word in their incorporated titles, 117 have it as their active legal name. Another 63 are inactive corporations, and 12 have declared Corridor as a fictitious name for a business within a different legal entity.

Several business owners say “Corridor” was a easy choice when it came to naming their business.

“Most of the time, they’ll say ‘My job is in the Corridor,’” Jennifer Lawrence of Corridor HR Solutions said of her clients. The Hiawatha firm took over for Management Resource Group in January 2016 after the Davenport firm closed its Corridor office. Ms. Lawrence wanted a name that connected with the community, noting that neither its clients nor the resources its leverages are confined to any one city.

Mark Dudrey observed the growing frequency with which he heard “Corridor” when opening a construction equipment rental business in 2009. He called the business Corridor Rentals, “because … I was in the Corridor, right in the heart of Solon, when I started it.”

Mr. Dudrey soon pivoted from renting construction equipment to travel trailers, adopting the name Corridor Campers, and moving it to his home in Mount Vernon. He now rents his fleet of campers via a website, and may soon expand to recreational vehicles.

When a group of partners started offering storage units in 2015, they chose the name Corridor Storage for their Marion business.

“I’ve talked about expanding to the south end of the Corridor, and for branding, this is good,” said Chad Pelley, manager of KTRO LLC, which adopted the Corridor Storage name. Using an online service to make storage easier to rent and pay for has been a big plus for the business, he said. It roughly doubled its space after one year, offering 300 storage units and about 100 secure outdoor parking spaces.

Companies with the word Corridor in their name offer wedding planning, window cleaning, therapy dogs, counseling services and a multitude of medical and professional specialties, to mention just a few. Ironically, the name was originally adopted to market the region to companies outside of it, not those already in it.

The name “Cedar Rapids-Iowa City Technology Corridor” was first applied in materials sent to outside businesses when the region was marketed jointly by the economic development agencies Priority One and the ICAD Group in the late 1990s, explained Dennis Jordan, a former Priority One staffer and later a vice president with the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance.

The term filled a need when marketing the area as a region, which was necessary to stand out amid tough competition from larger cities and regions. It was adopted for external use, he said, and it was unexpected that local residents would use it.

“It was about 10 years ago when we first started noticing people using the term locally,” Mr. Jordan recalled. “We would kind of chuckle about it, thinking we had something to do with that.”

Media outlets seemed to like it, and for a time The Gazette in Cedar Rapids branded itself using the tagline, “An independent newspaper in Iowa’s Technology Corridor.”

Economic development organizations realized there were some problems with the name, however. Cedar Rapids-Iowa City Technology Corridor didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. “Technology” was included in the name to underscore that companies in the region employ the latest technology, Mr. Jordan said, but that bothered some who thought it referred only to tech companies.

“A brand isn’t very good if you have to explain what it means,” he noted.

A regional branding specialist, North Star Corp., was brought in to help, and came up with the term “Iowa’s Creative Corridor.” Kirkwood Community College was contracted to manage and support the new brand in 2014, and Dawn Jones was hired as brand manager. Adding the word “creative” and building a logo and campaign emphasizing that aspect were important changes.

“Creative stemmed from the North Star report,” Ms. Jones said. “They did the research in the Corridor, and found we are creative in our craft. If you’re a welder or a dentist, you are still creating and finding better ways to do things. It doesn’t have to be theater or [artistic] things like that.”

Slow rollout
Ms. Jones is happy to see Corridor showing up in local business naming and branding, because it shows the brand is catching on. However, like most names, it has its pros and cons, said Lynn Manternach, president and co-founder of Mindfire Communications and a CBJ columnist.

“Consumers crave ‘local,’ and the name Corridor shows consumers that the business is local,” Ms. Manternach said. Consumers might also like the idea that their money will go back into the local economy.

The name Corridor doesn’t convey any other useful information about the business, however, and Ms. Manternach noted that many people in the state still don’t know what the Corridor is.

The latter is a serious issue, according to Mark Nolte, president of ICAD Group, which uses the Creative Corridor brand extensively.

“You can’t find the Creative Corridor on the map,” he said. “Outside the Corridor, how do we talk about the region? We still have to include the words Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.”

Having a regional brand that is recognized nationally is, in fact, something that only a handful of places such as North Carolina’s Research Triangle have been able to accomplish, Mr. Nolte said. He believes the new regional joint venture will help in expanding recognition of the Corridor outside its boundaries; he also sees local use of the brand as being popularized by its use in the media, citing CBS2/FOX28’s “Created in the Corridor” features and the CBJ.

Naming and branding companies with Corridor helps move perceptions in the right direction, according to Mr. Jordan. He expects it to influence more people outside the region’s core to begin identifying with it.

“I certainly think it helps people identify that they’re more than part of a single community – they’re part of a regional economy,” he said. “It tells them, ‘We can work with you wherever you live in this region.’”

Collaborative effort
Ms. Jones recited a long list of Kirkwood initiatives meant to promote the Creative Corridor brand. The most recent is Corridor Collaborator. “We’re asking businesses to partner- brand,” Ms. Jones said.

Businesses place the Iowa’s Creative Corridor brand and logo alongside their own on their website and marketing material. In turn, Kirkwood shares the story of that business on its creativecorridor.co website, and in its Creative Corridor Digest emails. At the end of the year, a partnership award will be presented to recognize an organization that has excelled.

Ms. Jones realizes that the regional branding initiative still has some people shaking their head, but believes most would find the logic behind it hard to dispute – that being recognized as a diverse region of 500,000 rather than a cluster of cities no larger than 126,000 will benefit the area’s business climate.

“The reason for that is strength in numbers,” she said. “For us to compete with New York, St. Louis and Chicago for economic development, for the talent, and for businesses to choose this area, we need the strength of the Corridor as a whole.”