Borrowed Playbook

There are a few common ways businesses end up here. Some grew through other channels (relationships, direct sales, B2B referrals) and only recently started investing in marketing as a discipline, which usually means they’ve hired help or adopted tools designed around national assumptions about how buyers behave. Some share a playbook with a national parent or partner organization, which works elsewhere and creates pressure to apply consistently. Some inherited a marketing approach from a previous era of the business, when the customer base looked different than it does now. All three paths end in roughly the same place: a marketing operation that’s executed well but mistranslated for the market you have or want.

The honest version of why this matters isn’t a marketing argument. It’s a structural one.

In our Why Maine Is Loved — But Hard for Business research, we documented something that explains a lot of Maine’s marketing patterns at once. When Mainers were asked whether they’d recommend Maine as a place to live, the response was warm. When they were asked whether they’d recommend Maine as a place to grow a business, the response was meaningfully cooler. That gap isn’t an attitude problem. It’s a real reflection of how challenging it is to build and scale a business here between workforce limitations, geographic distribution, infrastructure, cost structures, and even regulatory differences. The Mainers giving those answers are not wrong about our state.

What that means for busniesses is significant. A playbook designed for a market where business growth is broadly celebrated (most of the country) doesn’t land as well in a market where business growth is viewed with more ambivalence. The standard playbook moves, emphasizing scale, growth trajectory, market leadership, and  expansion plans, often produce disinterest or mild resistance here rather than the engagement they’d produce elsewhere. Not because Mainers are anti-business, but because the language of national business marketing is calibrated for a different cultural relationship to growth.

This is where many Maine businesses end up in a defensive posture, and where the borrowed playbook becomes most visible. The marketing gets more humble about growth, more abstract about scale, more focused on heritage and craft, and authenticity,  sometimes to the point where the business is underselling what it actually does and how it’s actually growing. The defensive posture creates its own problems because it makes the business harder for customers to evaluate, harder to recruit talent for, and harder to position for investment.

The fix isn’t a complete reinvention of your marketing. It’s a translation. The same business outcomes, the same growth goals, the same brand foundation, but framed in the language and through the lens that Maine audiences have been shown to respond to. That effort tends to highlight a different question for many: what would it mean to be seen as authentically Maine-based, in ways that connect rather than feel imposed? That’s the question the next Maine Insights Lab report, What Makes a Business Truly Maine-Based?, examines directly.

If the patterns above feel familiar, it’s probably because the playbook itself is well-built. It just wasn’t built for here. Most of the businesses we’ve helped with this kind of translation have found the work less disruptive than they expected, because the foundation is usually sound. What’s needed is calibration, not reconstruction.

What Makes a Business Truly Maine-Based? is on the Maine Insights Lab release calendar for summer. It picks up exactly where the Hard for Business report leaves off, examining what Maine audiences actually use to evaluate whether a business belongs here.

To get that report and other Maine Insights Lab findings as they’re released, The Strategy Brief is our biweekly newsletter for Maine business leaders. It’s the most reliable way to stay current as the research continues.

If you’re at the point of seriously rethinking how your marketing fits Maine and would like to talk through what that might look like for your business, reach out, we’d be happy to talk