The State of the Texas Brand

THOMAS GRAHAM is President, CEO and founder of Crosswind Media & Public Relations in Austin, Texas.

He is a nationally recognized brand advocate and a crisis-tested media spokesperson who has prepared, elevated, and navigated top global and regional leaders through crisis and towards opportunity for more than 30 years.

TEXAS PROVES POPULAR WELL BEYOND ITS BORDERS BUT IMAGINE THE IMAGE BOOST IF TEXAN TAYLOR SHERIDAN BROUGHT THE NEXT-GEN DUTTONS HOME … TO DALLAS?

It is always exciting to me to step outside the State of Texas and see how we are perceived as Texans from well beyond our borders. I have been across at least one ocean in the last several months, but I always scan the media whenever I travel short or long distances from our Lone Star, looking for how the world across the state line perceives us.

These days, Governor Abbott is always reliable clickbait for even the global press, no matter what intentional provocation he is up to at any given moment, and the impeachment proceedings against our notorious lieutenant governor had its own media-spiking moment last month.

Also spiking in June, the Hollywood media mob pretty much anointed Texan Taylor Sheridan as the reigning Emperor of Entertainment: Sheridan, the new owner of the famous 266,255-acre 6666 ranch near Lubbock, was the cover of powerful Variety, which extolled his Western TV series his megahit "Yellowstone", of course, but also the prequels: "1883" (about immigrants headed by wagon train north across Texas from first arrivals in Galveston and New Orleans) and "1923". My personal favorite of Taylor’s making was "Hell or High Water" he only wrote the screenplay but, boy howdy, I have rascals in my own family that act and talk just like Toby and Tanner Howard!

Of course, reading what’s in the media or on the silver screen isn’t always believing. Nor are even the most extensive media-reading exercises properly nuanced enough for those of us who polish image professionally. We like to measure impacts.

So, in May, we set out to approach our understanding of the external Texas image more objectively, more scientifically. We backed a fresh national poll that confirmed a 59 percent majority of Americans outside of Texas have a positive view of our favorite state. We have measured this before; this year’s positive result is a nice 14 percent increase from last year’s poll.

THE RESULTS

No cheating allowed, of course. Those reporting in to the professional pollsters all lived and worked outside Paradise — I mean Texas. The survey sought the opinion of 845 Americans outside Texas and was very formally conducted April 11-12, 2023 by the respected firm of Pulse Opinion Research LLC.

The new poll also showed that most Americans believe Texas is a good place to start a business (66%), a 13 percent increase from last year; to raise a family (64%), a 12 percent increase; and (first time asked) to travel for vacation (69%).

My interpretation of the stunning and positive results, once I stopped grin-

ning, was that our beloved state is seen as heading in the right direction despite frequent criticism in the outside top-tier media something I sometimes call the Yellow Prose of Texas. (OK, bad pun!)

Despite these occasional slams from outside media, the new poll results reliably demonstrate that outsiders still believe Texas is pro-business, family-friendly, and a premier travel destination. And the results, positive now over two years, suggest those values are durable. Measurable durability in a brand is what professional image masters, most politicians and retailers like to see.

Here’s my solution to quickly rope those renegades into the herd: Let’s

pressure our state’s unofficial but most accomplished brand master, the prolific producer / writer / actor / director / rancher / junior-mustang-cutter (whew!) Taylor Sheridan, to give us a hand and abandon his current and ridiculous obsession with Montana. Time to bring his Duttons home to Texas where they really belong?

Taylor is already shooting virtually all of his blockbuster shows right here on his immense North Texas Four Sixes ranch which is nearly (shudder!) the size of Los Angeles and probably has a mortgage needing payments the size of many a small nation’s national debt.

Everybody knows even Texans who drive their wagons and cattle north to the Far Freezer States eventually yearn to return to the sunshine and bluebonnets of the Texas Motherland. Didn’t lonesome Larry McMurtry’s Augustus McCrae make Captain Woodrow Call bring those frozen bones back to Texas for burial in Clara’s orchard on the Guadalupe? Sure he did. And doesn’t John Grady Cole make it back to Texas?

I rest my case: The next generation of Duttons should be in energy and pipelines anyway, and where better than … did someone say "Dallas"?

As Texans, we like to be liked, so we do need to obsess a bit about the small group of Americans who haven’t yet been persuaded that our Texas is a paradise. According to the May poll: 9% of Americans polled said they have a somewhat negative view of the state. 12% have a very negative view. 17% of those surveyed held a neutral view of the state.