A challenge has been issued — one that involves not only everyone in attendance at the seventh annual OneNKY Alliance Summit, but everyone across Northern Kentucky.
The OneNKY Alliance, a nonprofit advocating for a unified and connected Northern Kentucky, encouraged business leaders and community stakeholders to participate in one of the organization’s initiatives to promote systemic change within the region. These initiatives include Breathe Easy NKY, EducateNKY, and the OneNKY Center among others.
“This initiative speaks more about alignment, strategic alignment, and the OneNKY Challenge is meant to create that opportunity for strategic alignment as we look across our community and create a culture, a mindset, of working together for top priorities and goals that are developed on behalf of our community,” OneNKY Alliance Executive Director Karen Finan said.
To advance this challenge, Finan touted Building CommUNITY, a marketing effort focusing on strategic outreach and engagement tactics to promote OneNKY. This campaign included placing a series of billboards throughout Kenton, Campbell and Boone counties and advertisements in print and digital publications.
“What we were really trying to do here is make sure that we’re continuing the dialogue – getting people talking about this,” said Sylvia Buxton, OneNKY board member and CEO of Perfetti Van Melle North America. “We intend to extend this campaign into more media, into more areas, and to add additional taglines.”
A core theme of the OneNKY Summit was branding, specifically crafting a regional identity and narrative for Northern Kentucky. Due to its location, Northern Kentucky is often categorized as “not quite Cincinnati, not quite Kentucky.” This can make creating a region-specific identity difficult.
“We’re not identified outside the region,” said Jeremie Feinblatt, vice president of strategy at Resonance, a New York City-based consulting firm. “Northern Kentucky, outside a 100-mile radius, is not really a brand. It feels like an artificial construct.”
Resonance was hired to help create this region-specific identity. Feinblatt said Northern Kentucky must focus on crafting an identity apart from Cincinnati and Kentucky. He mentioned that Cincinnati and Kentucky have had hundreds of years to build brand equity, while Northern Kentucky has not. However, this isn’t inherently negative.
“What we’re here to do is not change the reputation of Northern Kentucky, but create something that people want to adhere to,” Feinblatt said.
Feinblatt said Northern Kentucky should focus on touting its assets: high quality of life, logistics industry and access to large companies such as Amazon and DHL. Encapsulating movement is a significant focus of the branding effort. This can come through using the region’s logistics sector as a branding tool – a region in motion.
“This is movement. This is motion,” Feinblatt said. “We’re a region in motion, and we strongly believe here, in Northern Kentucky, in progress. We look to the future. And what do we think fuels progress? Motion. Movement.”
One of the final announcements made at the summit was the unveiling of the OneNKY Connector Trail — a 31-mile trail featuring both paved and natural surfaces across Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties.
Jason Reser, trail development coordinator at the Cincinnati Off-Road Alliance, said the project is about building a legacy for the community to enjoy.
“Northern Kentucky and the OneNKY region is ready to connect with on-road trails, off-road, paved and natural surface, to new and exciting destinations like Eons Park and Fox Run, as well as our landmark destinations like Devou Park and the Purple People Bridge, weaving through our communities for maximum fun and impact,” Reser said.
