What do Sacramento business leaders want to convey with a new regional slogan?
Over the course of two years, some of Sacramento’s top marketing professionals have considered how the metro area could improve its reputation with the outside world.
They surveyed 3,700 current and former Sacramentans. They spoke with site selectors for global companies and held focus groups with CEOs, college students and marketing professionals. And this week, the Greater Sacramento Economic Council announced the result, a new regional brand:
“Be more. Do Greater Sacramento.”
“To ‘be more’ means to live your absolute best life,” Wendy Hauteman, chief marketing officer for VSP Vision and co-chair of the brand steering committee, told the crowd at a launch event Tuesday evening at Golden 1 Center. “Grow your tech startup into a giant. Expand a business. Build a career. Start a family… None of it is at the expense of the other.”
It was clear that many of Sacramento’s movers and shakers want to see the region escape its reputation as a small, government town, and show off its amenities and economic growth.
“Sacramento is like The Little Engine That Could,” Roshaun Davis, CEO of the event services company Unseen Heroes and founder of the nonprofit CLTRE, said during a panel discussion at the event Tuesday. “I think for a long time that’s been a detriment to us, because we look at San Francisco and think, ‘We’re not as cool as them,’ or we look at Lake Tahoe and think, ‘We’re not as cool as them’… Before we were looking outward. I think now we’re channeling inward and standing in what we’re really good at.”
The region’s restaurant community has built a national reputation. Venture capital to grow young businesses, which has generally been easier to access in the Bay Area, is becoming more readily available here, said Greg Connolly, founder of Trifecta and founder and CEO of Kora.
The local semiconductor industry is growing. Though Intel has been shrinking its campus in Folsom, Bosch plans to invest up to $1.9 billion to build chips in Roseville, in part with funding from the CHIPS and Science Act. An El Dorado Hills-based chip company, Blaize, went public last month.
And Tuesday’s event was hosted in an NBA arena that didn’t exist a mere decade ago.
Hauteman said the economic council’s campaign will appear on social media and on billboards in the months ahead.
“We need to make sure the world knows all we have to offer,” Hauteman said. “We need to make sure the world sees this region like we see it.”
This story was originally published February 19, 2025 at 1:15 PM.
