LI Innovation Park boosts brand with 400 flags | Long Island Business News
Driving though the 1,400-acre Long Island Innovation Park at Hauppauge, you’d be hard-pressed to miss its new marketing campaign, where 400 two-foot-by-three-foot banners welcome visitors throughout the park.
The banners are in effort to boost the area, formerly known as Hauppauge Industrial Park, whose 1,400 businesses have an annual output of $13 billion and employ 55,000 people. The effort was supported by the Town of Smithtown, whose workers attached the flags onto the town-owned poles.
The new campaign stems from a 2019 analysis of the park and its future, in a study prepared by James Lima Planning + Development and funded by the Suffolk County Industrial Development Agency and the Regional Plan Association. One recommendation in the report was to elevate the park’s public profile and draw greater attention to the role it plays in the region’s economy.
Customized flags, which were made available for purchase by individual businesses located in the park, were quickly sold-out, according to a news release about the new marketing initiative.
HIA-LI President and CEO Terri Alessi-Miceli highlighted the park’s strength in the news release, saying it “has no equal when it comes to generating employment and business growth in our region.”
“By reinforcing popular awareness of the park, we help set the stage for new partnerships and new achievements,” she added.
“While the Long Island Innovation Park at Hauppauge already stands as the cornerstone of the regional economy, it also possesses great potential for further growth,” Carol Allen, chairperson of the HIA-LI board and president and CEO of People’s Alliance Federal Credit Union, said in the news release.
“We help generate that new growth when we take steps to strengthen recognition of our identity,” Allen added.
“By building the park’s brand, we better capitalize on its extraordinary, proven capacity to bring net, new dollars into the region because of the park’s high proportion of tradable businesses,” Joe Campolo, managing partner at Campolo, Middleton & McCormick, LLP in Ronkonkoma and chair of HIA-LI’s Long Island Economic Development Task Force, said in the news release.
“The park’s ratio of revenue-generating, tradable companies is two-and-a-half times that of Long Island as a whole,” he added.
It was HIA-LI board member Paule Pachter, CEO of Long Island Cares, Inc./The Harry Chapin Food Bank, who suggested the flag initiative as a way to elevate the branding of the industrial park, according to Alessi-Miceli.