In September 2011, a Development Counsellors International survey of 322 U.S. corporate executives ranked the states by perceived business climate. Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina came in at the top of the favorable list. California, New York, and Illinois came in at the bottom — with Illinois ranked third-worst behind California and New York. The survey cited high corporate taxes, regulatory burden, and overall cost of doing business as the primary drivers of the unfavorable ratings.
The survey itself was unremarkable. Surveys like it are commissioned every year and reported in regional business press. What made the 2011 result useful as a public-affairs case is what the unfavorable states did with the data — which in most cases was nothing.
The principle: state reputation is an economic asset
A state's reputation among corporate site-selection executives is not soft. It is a hard input into capital allocation decisions that move thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in tax base across state lines every year. Site-selection consultants build short lists from executive perception data of exactly this kind. A state that lands on the wrong end of three or four consecutive surveys begins to drop off the short lists before the underlying facts have a chance to be argued.
That is why the unfavorable states cannot afford to dismiss the surveys as partisan, ignore them as anecdotal, or wait them out. The data compounds. By the time a state's economic development office is trying to recover the narrative, the site-selection consultants have already moved on to the states that have been working the relationship the whole time.
What the favorable states do
Texas, the Carolinas, and the other consistently favorable states do three things that the unfavorable states usually do not.
Treat economic development communications as a continuous function. Sustained outreach to the corporate executive audience, the site-selection consultant community, and the trade press that covers corporate relocation. Not an annual budget line. A continuous program.
Anchor the message to verifiable data. Tax rate comparisons. Workforce statistics. Permit timelines. Energy costs. The favorable states make the data easy to find, easy to cite, and easy to compare. The unfavorable states often make it harder to find.
Maintain a credible spokesperson at the governor's office. The favorable states have a governor or lieutenant governor who shows up at site-selection conferences, takes meetings with relocating CEOs, and is personally identified with the state's economic case. The unfavorable states often delegate that function to the third tier.
What the unfavorable states should do
Engage the survey directly. Respond to the specific findings with specific data. A state that does not engage looks like a state that has nothing to say.
Identify the recoverable variables. Some inputs the state cannot change in the short term (cost of living, geography). Others it can change with policy action (permit timelines, workforce training programs, targeted tax credits). The recoverable variables deserve a sustained communications program.
Recruit credible business voices. The most effective response to "this state is bad for business" is a successful local employer on the record saying why it is operating there. Those voices exist in every state. They have to be asked.
Stop arguing with the survey methodology. Methodology arguments lose the audience. The audience is making capital decisions. It does not care which weighting was used.
The takeaway
State-level public affairs is one of the most underdeveloped categories in American government communications. States with favorable business reputations earn billions in incremental investment every year because they treat the reputation as an asset to be managed. States with unfavorable reputations lose comparable amounts because they treat the reputation as someone else's problem. The 2011 DCI survey is a small data point in a long pattern, and the lesson for any state economic-development office that lands on the wrong end of one of these surveys is to respond to it as a communications problem with a communications playbook — not as an insult to be ignored.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
