Dear Editor, Prime Minister Wen’s visit to Birmingham has highlighted the mountain our city has to climb in raising its profile at home.
Sky’s coverage of this important event was fair and unbiased in its national coverage, but where was the BBC? Plenty of national BBC news time was given over to the meetings between David Cameron and Wen Jiabao, and rightly so, but virtually nothing was mentioned of one of the world’s most powerful men symbolically choosing to start his visit in Birmingham and indulging himself in Stratford.
Indeed the BBC could barely bring itself to use the name ‘Birmingham’, choosing to say Longbridge was “near Birmingham”.
There is some irony that the Prime Minister of a large and powerful faraway country recognises the city whereas our own state-funded and otherwise wonderful broadcasting institution does not.
Furthermore, Wen Jiabao understood that the industrial revolution started here in the Midlands but the BBC still propagates the myth that it began in Manchester.
This only goes to highlight how on-the-ball our civic, business academic and marketing leaders must be.
At the highest levels they should be influencing the media, lobbying, correcting and even criticising when necessary, to ensure we get fair coverage at the very least.
It is heartening to see posters in London for Birmingham’s cultural events and universities but it needs more than that.
Talking to Birmingham’s business community they all agree that we compare favourably to any city in the UK but we don’t quite get the message across; we don’t talk ourselves up enough. It is typically Brummie to be self-deprecating but we need to switch that function off when necessary.
Marketing Birmingham does a fine job but in order to attract more investment to the city it needs to move up a couple of gears.
A fantastic and sustained UK marketing campaign over several years, orchestrated by one of our home grown, high-profile and influential advertising/marketing companies would help do the trick, as would a charismatic elected mayor.
If we don’t, other cities that market themselves better will continue to beat us to it.
Matthew P Bott
Jewellery Quarter
