Like it or not, we're a brand, sort of
Cars? Ford for me, though I’ll admit Toyotas have earned a place on the planet. Jeans? Levis. Toothpaste? Colgate, thanks. Beer? Corona please. Soda? Coke. Newspaper? The Saipan Tribune, naturally.
Be they things big and expensive, small and cheap, or somewhere in between, we all identify with brands. There’s a reason for “branding.” It gives us a reliable index of quality, a benchmark for what we can expect from products. In doing so, it gets us around an economic problem known as “information costs,” which gum up the smooth workings of the free market.
If you’re at the store and have to pry open a box of corn flakes in order to inspect it, you wouldn’t have a very efficient market, would you? Instead, you know from the brand what’s in the box. Ah, the almighty brand.
Heck, even I’m a brand of sorts, as you read these very words. That’s the whole idea behind a column: It’s got somebody’s name nailed to it. From that name, you can pretty much figure whether an article will be worth reading, or if it’s likely to totally suck.
Even our fair island is a brand of sorts. Just ask a tourist. “Saipan” has a distinct connotation of a certain level of quality, and a certain type of tourism experience.
And there’s more. Saipan’s also a brand of sorts when it comes to investments. And, on this count, we really stink. Our fair commonwealth is disreputable in financial circles. Something as simple as building a power plant is beyond our ken, which has inspired all sorts of suspicion and animosity in the mainland United States.
Furthermore, like many crossroads, we’ve attracted a plethora of hustlers, sleezoids, crooks, swindlers, con-artists, and human butt-maggots of every imaginable shape and size. That’s more than a social problem, it’s become an economic one. The smallest, most insignificant business factors that you could take for granted in some other places can’t be taken as givens here.
Which, of course, makes business difficult to conduct. If you can’t trust anybody in the long and twisted financial chain of commerce, it drags your business down. Promises made aren’t kept. Agreements in writing have to be taken to court to enforce. Sheer bungling and incompetence crop up at the most inopportune times. Corruption? You bet. And, as if invisible white collar crime isn’t enough, good old fashioned theft and larceny are always happy to appear.
Meaning, if you’re going to invest here, you’ve got to shake out the business box of corn flakes, and inspect every, single, solitary grain. How efficient is that? Not very.
So, as a brand for investors, Saipan isn’t up there with Hong Kong, New York, or even Guam. I know of quite a few projects that have died on the drawing board not because they wouldn’t have been viable, but because our name has such a stigma that it drove potential funders away like a shopper avoiding a rotting and stinky fish.
While we’re pointing our fingers at Asia’s economic woes, we seem to be missing the main point. Asia can’t clean up Saipan’s act. Only Saipan can do that. In the meantime, most investors will choose other brands, and they’ll leave us on the shelf gathering economic dust.
So if you think a power plant is a ponderous thing to build, consider that building a reputation–-a brand–-is as enduring and profound as time itself.
Stephens is an economist with Stephens Corporation, a professional organization in the NMI. His column appears three times a week: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Mr. Stephens can be contacted via the following e-mail address: ed4Saipan@yahoo.com.
