So Our Region Is Now The 757?

We’ve been bullied before. We can’t let it happen again.

Time to tell the twits at the Hampton Roads Chamber and the Peninsula Chamber of Commerce that we aren’t going to let them saddle us with another cringe-inducing moniker that will stink up the place like flounder left too long in the sun.

Did we learn nothing from the 1980s when unimaginative power brokers decided that Tidewater was too, well, evocative a name? These geniuses yearned for something uglier to sell the region. Boy did we get it: Hampton Roads.

It never caught on despite the best efforts of The Virginian-Pilot, which actually forbade its writers to use the “T” word.

Hampton Roads was universally loathed. No one ever told an outsider they lived in Hampton Roads. It was always Tidewater, Virginia Beach, Norfolk or Southeastern Virginia.

It took four decades for these dweebs to admit that they made a colossal mistake. Now they’re about to do it again.

The two Chambers spent an unknown amount of money to “rebrand” the region. And here it is:

757

Yup, We’re now reduced to an area code. Not that anyone in say, California or Kansas, will know that’s the meaning of these three digits.

The suits who yearn to be cool pretend they like 757 because they’ve been told this is what high school kids use in their email addresses. It’s urban slang for the region. “I’m from the 757,” teens say, apparently.

No one over the age of 25 - except rappers - talk like that, but in an effort to seem hip and to “attract millennials” to our region, these unimaginative bankers, accountants and bureaucrats have mindlessly leapt on board.

OK. I admit that I’m skeptical of everything the Chamber does. Especially since it launched an ugly smear campaign during last year’s Virginia Beach City Council elections in a desperate attempt to get good government Councilman John Moss off that body and to install one of their own.

So I called for an unbiased opinion from one of the nation’s branding pioneers. My far more successful sibling, Tom Dougherty. Nearly 20 years ago he founded Stealing Share, a global branding company based in Greensboro, NC.

I sent him several articles about the new name and waited to hear from him.

It didn’t take long.

“It’s garbage,” Tom said, without saying hello. “Total garbage.”

“For a brand to be successful it has to be authentic,” he told me. “And aspirational.

“What does it mean to be 757?” he asked. “It has no meaning at all. There’s no emotional connectivity to it. It’s a NUMBER.

“Are you emotionally attached to your home,” he asked, “or to your telephone number?”

“A good brand needs no explanation,” Tom added. “No one outside of your area is going to know what 757 means. They’re going to have to explain it over and over.”

The key ingredient to a successful brand is authenticity, according to my smart brother.

The 757 is “trying too hard to be something it’s not,” he said, adding that the new moniker was “@#$%^& ridiculous”.

Who am I to disagree with my brother?