What Is Central Mass | The many ways of looking at a region
Photo/Courtesy
Victor Normand, president of Acton Real Estate Co.
If you’re in Central Massachusetts and you have a LinkedIn account, chances are you’ve noticed that the dominant business networking site thinks you’re in Greater Boston.
Facebook, on the other hand, offers you a choice. If you live in Shrewsbury, you can be part of the site’s Boston, Worcester or Lowell networks. Elsewhere in the region, your choices may include Springfield or Manchester, N.H.
The different approaches to geography aren’t confined to the world of social networking. As businesses in this area market themselves, build connections and just think about their identities, they describe their place in the world in a variety of ways.
Much Greater Boston
Victor Normand, president of Acton Real Estate Co., said he sees the homebuyers he works with looking at geography in a far different way than they might have a generation ago. People looking for access to Boston for work or play think about moving as far away as Shrewsbury, Lunenburg or even Hubbardston.
“I think that geography and geographic labels are losing their significance, particularly to younger people,” he said. “They just live in a virtual world, quite frankly.”
In contrast, Normand said, as a child he saw his mother’s family, a set of 12 siblings from Holyoke, deeply worried over a move of about the same distance as the Worcester-Boston commute.
“One of my aunts was moving to Worcester from Holyoke,” he said. “And the whole family was in turmoil because they thought they’d never see her again.”
But Matt Ward, president and CEO of Central Mass Web Design in Gardner, said geography is still important for most businesses.
In fact, he said he named his company to take advantage of the way people search for vendors. Even though the Internet makes it simple to do business with someone in California, or Australia, Ward said that’s not how most people use it.
“When people look on the web for things, they look geographically now,” he said. “That’s the new standard.”
And, although he can and does design web sites for companies all over the world, he said most really want to work with someone close by.
“Face-to-face business is so much different,” he said. “People trust you more if you show up, if you’re in arm’s reach. If they have an issue you can sit down and discuss it.”
So, the question for many businesses is, who do they want to be sitting down with?
For David Glispin, founder and president of Sunshine Sign Co. in North Grafton, for a long time the answer was Boston companies.
“Generally we feel that the Boston market honestly has more opportunities, and … the projects that we do in Boston are pretty upscale, pretty sophisticated,” he said.
But in recent years Sunshine Sign has done more work in Worcester, making signs for the city’s new courthouse, the renovated Hanover Theatre and other high-profile projects.
“I think we’ve been pleasantly surprised and very impressed with the opportunities we’ve had in Worcester,” he said.
Tough Town
Of course Sunshine, which tags itself “A Worcester/Boston area sign company” on its web site, is happy with the business it can get in Boston. But Glispin said its foothold in that busy market is possible only because of the relationships it’s built with general contractors over the years.
“I guess we’ve been looked at as a Central Massachusetts-based company that has the ability to work in Boston,” he said. “For an entry-level company, breaking into the Boston and [Route] 128 area would be much more challenging.”
Ward said he finds that many people in Boston and neighboring communities don’t want to do business with anyone outside I-495, which makes it easier for him to focus his business west of the highway.
But he said there are also some advantages to being linked, at least virtually, with the Hub. He said the “Greater Boston” tag on LinkedIn means that he can more easily make connections with important technology companies within the Route 128 beltway.
“If they segregate it off into Central Massachusetts, it’s going to be a smaller group you’re going to connect to,” he said.
For some companies the question of what region to identify with can get complicated.
A Hudson business might consider itself part of Central Massachusetts (as the Worcester Business Journal defines it), the Marlborough region (as the Marlborough Regional Chamber of Commerce has it), MetroWest (The MetroWest Daily News, among others) or Greater Boston (per LinkedIn).
But both Ward and Normand say that those kinds of labels may not ultimately make much difference.
Normand said many of the potential homebuyers he works with, even those from outside the state, have done research online and come up with particular towns that suit their needs, often based on their school systems.
Ward said most people searching the Internet for companies aren’t typing in names for general geographies but specific cities and towns.
In the area his business focuses on, he said, common searches are likely to be for “Worcester,” “Leominster” or “Marlborough.”
“I don’t think anyone’s searching for ‘Greater Worcester,’” he said.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments