Last month, I wrote about why a region needs a calling card, the top-level way a region explains where its strengths come together and where it intends to lead. This month I want to go one layer deeper: how does a region actually choose one?
The honest answer is that it is not a branding exercise. It is a data exercise first, and a branding exercise second.
Over the past year, Northeast Indiana has been running exactly that kind of analysis as part of our SWOT process and regional planning update. I cannot walk you through the full findings yet. That work is still moving through our regional governance structure, and we want the eventual announcement made with the right partners in the room. But I can walk you through how we are thinking about it, because the process itself is worth sharing.
Start with what already exists, not what sounds good.
Test for breadth, not just depth. Weigh wage quality alongside job counts
One or two strong counties do not make a regional calling card. Part of our analysis scored potential focus areas county by county across all eleven counties, looking for where strengths were broad and reinforcing rather than concentrated in just one or two places. A true regional calling card needs to show up in enough of the region that every county can see itself in it, even if not every county leads the same way. Also, job counts alone can be misleading. We also looked at earnings per worker across candidate sectors, because a calling card built around low-wage, high-turnover work does not move the needle on household income the way one built around higher-wage, higher-skill work does.
Compare local trajectory to national trajectory.
This was one of the more important lessons in our process. Some of the region’s strongest existing core industries are forecasted to stay flat, or slightly decline, here in Northeast Indiana, even as those same industries are projected to keep growing nationally. That sounds like bad news. It is not, once you understand why.
Three forces are driving that gap. First, workforce demographics: our labor force is aging, like much of the industrial Midwest, and replacement rates in some core industries have not kept pace with retirements. Second, automation and productivity: a single worker, equipped with better machinery and process design, now produces meaningfully more than a decade ago. That is good for competitiveness and wages, but it means national output can rise while regional headcount holds flat. Third, national growth does not flow automatically to every region that participates in a sector. It flows to regions that actively position themselves to capture it, through marketing, site readiness, and a clear enough identity that site selectors know where to look. Regions that stay quiet about their strengths do not lose their capability. They lose their share of the next round of investment in it.
That is why we do not think of the calling card only as a growth strategy. We think of it as a defense-and-renewal strategy first, and a growth strategy second: making sure Northeast Indiana does not quietly lose ground in what it has spent decades building, while positioning to capture its share of what is coming next. It runs two plays at once, capturing new opportunity and protecting existing capability from erosion.
A calling card that only makes sense internally will struggle to attract outside investment. We weighed how well each candidate direction aligns with the state’s own priorities and with where national investment and site-selector attention are trending. The goal is not to copy another region, but to find the version of our own strength that is also in the market’s line of sight.
Every region can point to five or six things it does reasonably well. The discipline is narrowing that list to the two or three where the region is genuinely distinctive, not just competent, which means being honest about where we are good, but not great, and where we are truly hard to replicate.
That is the work underway across NEI, our LEDOs, the Mayors and Commissioners Caucus, and our Strategic Development Commission. We are close. When the plans are finalized, we intend to announce it the right way, with the full weight of our regional and, we hope, state partners standing behind it.
