Baltimore Alliance

Trend forecaster Faith Popcorn, who advises corporations such as IBM, RJR Nabisco Holdings and American Express, has agreed to gaze into greater Baltimore's future -- the first community project she has ever taken on -- to assess the next decade of business opportunities and to help create a brand identity for the region.Popcorn will be paid $275,000 for her work by the Greater Baltimore Alliance, a regional economic development group that gets its financing from business donations and tax dollars.

When Lois C. Yates chaired an economic development literature contest last year, it gave her an eye-opening look at a cross-section of the advertising being used to tout cities and regions across the country.What she saw in those 1,200-plus entries, including 150 videos, was a lot of similarity."There was the same deer shot in 15 different videos," said Yates, vice president of marketing and work force development for the Greater Baltimore Alliance. "There's a lot of clutter out there."Breaking out of that safe, look-alike advertising is the goal of a new campaign being launched by GBA to sell the region.

In its loudest statement yet that it wants to be a more vocal player in shaping the area it serves, the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors announced that it is giving $250,000 to the Greater Baltimore Alliance.The "investment" in the GBA, an organization of private and civic leaders formed to promote Baltimore and its surrounding counties, will be $50,000 a year for the next five years. It is the largest gift by the board to any one organization."To me, this is one of the things that I am most proud of that I got the board to do," said Gilbert D. Marsiglia, outgoing president of the board of Realtors.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening picked up the endorsement yesterday of a politically active group of Baltimore-area ministers, who praised his opposition to casino-style gambling and his positions on education and welfare issues.While he has lost the support of Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, a former ally who has endorsed Harford County Executive Eileen M. Rehrmann in the Democratic primary, Glendening has won the backing of a group of influential ministers -- as well as nearly all of the city's state legislators.

The Greater Baltimore Alliance has selected a group of local business executives for out-of-town trips to drum up interest in the area. Now the group is taking its show around the Beltway.Yesterday, executives from Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., Bell Atlantic Corp., Arbitron Co. and Comcast Communications Inc. carried the GBA's regionalism-or-die message to members of the Howard County Chamber of Commerce.Before the home crowd, the executives were enthusiastic about the area's potential, but blunt in detailing its shortcomings, such as being high on regulation, short on technology workers and apathetic on some business issues.

WHAT COMES TO mind when you mention the Baltimore area to friends or business associates? A jumble of disconnected attributes perhaps -- everything from steamed crabs and the Orioles to Harborplace and "Homicide.""We have a really positive tourism image but our business image does not match that," says Ionna Morfessis, who came here in March from Arizona to be president of the Greater Baltimore Alliance.That regional economic development group has now launched an $11.5 million marketing push that will initially last for five years.

The new group charged with selling metro Baltimore to the world's businesses rolled out its recent work yesterday: a map of the economic landscape, a proposed route through it and a pep talk about the destination.Six months after hiring Arizona's Ioanna Morfessis as its boss, the Greater Baltimore Alliance presented a sobering appraisal of the region's image among business types as well as a plan to improve it.GBA, composed of business people and government officials from Baltimore and its five satellite counties, will launch a national "just the facts" advertising campaign about metro Baltimore's business attributes.

Baltimore's City Council president thinks the rest of the state is out "to castrate city government." One Carroll County commissioner believes that "if Baltimore dies, it dies." A caucus of state legislators from Baltimore County once banned six colleagues whose impure districts include parts of Baltimore City.Into this den of good will steps Ioanna Morfessis, charged with cementing metro Baltimore's motley parts and peddling the whole to the world.It's not a job for the gauche or fainthearted, but neither was kicking an Arizona governor from the speech lectern.

AFTER THREE YEARS of existing under the aegis of the Greater Baltimore Committee, the Greater Baltimore Alliance is going independent. And it has hired its first president, Ioanna Morfessis.In the seven years Ms. Morfessis led the Greater Phoenix Economic Council in Arizona, the group assisted 139 firms in establishing operations in the area. The effort created 64,500 jobs and helped the area restart an economic boom that had gone bust. Prior to that, she was Montgomery County's economic development director.

Don't think of Baltimore with Philadelphia, Cleveland and the rest of the Rust Belt, says metro Baltimore's new, highly touted economic saleswoman. Think Baltimore, Charlotte, N.C., Seattle, San Diego."