Business View City & Municipal | August 2022

30 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 7 are helping to elevate the Saint John region’s place brand and generate regional economic impact. “There was obviously some debate around the agency’s name, but there was no denying that the City of Saint John would be the anchor,” offers Hicks. “We know if Saint John succeeds, the region succeeds. When the region succeeds, New Brunswick succeeds.” “We’d built a solid foundation for our destination brand through the legacy agency, Discover Saint John,” adds Jillian MacKinnon, VP of Marketing, Communications & Strategic Initiatives. “We took all that research and we’ve now applied it to the development of a place brand.” She describes the agency as “a complex brand ecosystem” and their “North Star” for attracting investment business, immigrants, new residents, and students. “It was really built out over the past 20 months through a lot of research and learning,” MacKinnon says. A new destination brand, “Discover Saint John & the Towns by the Bay” was launched in 2021 “to great fanfare locally,” according to MacKinnon. “This year, we’ve really built on what we call Paulette’s Listening Tours. When Paulette joined the agency in early February 2021, her first order of business as part of a 30-, 60-, and 90- day plan, was to go around and meet everybody. That meant everybody in the ecosystem and all the municipalities. Talking to key stakeholders, small business owners, and global headquarters about the issues, challenges, and opportunities that they saw for the region. We took that and we built out a strategic vision. We did some market research and developed value propositions based on all of that knowledge.” Envision Saint John has taken a whole-system approach where all partners and ecosystems have accountabilities to achieve success. While the agency won’t directly create the jobs, they are working with partners and creating the