By: Mark Fitzgerald Newspapers launch rebranding cam-paigns all the time. But in Chicago's northwestern suburbs, the
Northwest Herald is doing something unusual -- it's rebranding its circulation area.
Robert A. Shaw created the
Northwest Herald daily newspaper in 1986 by folding all of the weeklies and small dailies his family's Shaw Newspapers published in McHenry County, and announcing: "McHenry County deserves a great daily." John Rung, who took over as publisher last August, said the paper now has a new declaration: "The Northwest Territory deserves a great paper."
It had never occurred to anyone to call the region around the
Northwest Herald's Crystal Lake headquarters the Northwest Territory -- and Rung said he hated the name when an advertising agency first suggested it. "But everybody I talked to, and everybody the Ogilvy & Mather people talked to pretty much unanimously like the concept," Rung said.
The new campaign is the
Northwest Herald's response to a competitive situation that is becoming more common across America: the fight to capture the loyalties of a wave of new residents who are coming not from the central cities -- but from older suburbs. The paper's Northwest Territory concept includes all of McHenry County and the northern part of Kane County. Both counties have exploded in population as farmland is converted to developments and residents from Chicago and its older suburbs discover the small-town charm of such communities as Woodstock, which was used as the setting for the movie
Groundhog Day.
Complicating the
Northwest Herald's competitive challenge is its very name. A
Northwest Herald market study showed that fully 25% of its own readers think the 35,649-circulation paper is either a zoned edition or an affiliate of another fast-growing family-owned suburban paper -- Paddock Publications Inc.'s 149,882-circulation
Daily Herald in Arlington Heights.
More worrying, Rung said, was the attitude of newcomers: "The people who were coming here didn't get that we were the paper for the area."
Indeed, the rival
Daily Herald -- which says its readership surveys don't find significant confusion with the
Northwest Herald -- claims many of those newcomers as its own. "As we've moved further into McHenry and Kane County, we've found the migration patterns are very favorable to us," said Douglas K. Ray, CEO and president of Paddock Publications. Many of the newcomers, he said, grew up in suburbs in the
Daily Herald's traditional core market.
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