Broken Arrow changed how outsiders saw it by swapping a single word: town became city. That one edit, repeated consistently across websites, press releases, and pitch decks, re-positioned the community in the early screening process site selectors and relocating families run before they ever pick up the phone.
Two facts back up why the shift stuck. Broken Arrow is a fast-growing incorporated city with more than 120,000 residents that grew nearly 15% in a single decade, and it recently backed that growth with visible investment, including the New Orleans Square revitalization and a rebranded Visit Broken Arrow identity built around vibrancy instead of quaintness.
This article covers what changed, why the research says language moves the needle on investment and talent decisions, and how to run the same audit on your own community's copy.
- The claim: consistent city language beat inconsistent town language for outside perception.
- The proof: population growth, area size, and a documented placemaking push.
- The payoff: a repeatable audit and rollout plan you can run this quarter.
Key Takeaways
Language that undersells a growing community filters out investment and talent before either ever reaches a formal review.
| Point | Details |
|---|---|
| The core claim | Consistent "city" language, not new amenities, was Broken Arrow's fastest lever for changing outside perception. |
| The proof point | Broken Arrow grew significantly over a decade to over 120,000 residents, a scale its old "town" language didn't reflect. |
| The mechanism | Site selectors and relocating talent use language as an early filter before checking labor and infrastructure data. |
| The audit | Search your assets for "town," "small," "quaint," and "hidden gem," then keep, modify, or replace each instance. |
| The next step | Southwind Marketing runs language and brand audits paired with economic development marketing to make the fix stick. |
Table of Contents
- From Town to City: How One Word Changed Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
- Does Language Actually Affect Site Selection and Investment?
- How to Audit Your Community's Language
- How to Roll Out the New Language Across Your Community
- Get a Language and Brand Audit for Your Community
- Sources
- FAQ
From Town to City: How One Word Changed Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
Broken Arrow didn't become a city overnight. It became one on paper decades ago. What changed recently is that its marketing finally caught up to that reality.
For years, official materials, tourism copy, and even some economic development pitches described Broken Arrow with softer, smaller language: charming town, tight-knit community, hidden gem near Tulsa. That language wasn't dishonest, exactly. It just didn't match a place that had quietly become one of Oklahoma's largest cities.
The numbers tell the real story. Broken Arrow spans roughly 60 square miles and carries a population over 120,000, having grown about 14.8% between 2010 and 2020. That's not incremental growth. That's a place absorbing new residents faster than most of its regional peers, and the copy needed to catch up.
Three moves mark the turning point:
- New Orleans Square revitalization. The city and local partners rebuilt an aging commercial corridor and launched it with a new logo and a public block party, treating the district relaunch as a citywide event rather than a quiet ribbon cutting.
- Visit Broken Arrow rebrand. The destination marketing arm rolled out a modernized logo built to reflect the city's vibrancy rather than its history as a bedroom suburb, and paired it with targeted regional tourism campaigns and hotel incentives aimed at visitors within a regional radius.
- Amplify BA. The Broken Arrow Economic Development Corporation launched a multi-year capital investment campaign tied to workforce development, site readiness, and job creation, giving the new language something concrete to point to.
Broken Arrow's population grew significantly in a decade while its public-facing brand still described it in small-town terms. Closing that gap, not adding new amenities, was the fastest available lever.
The through line across all three moves: officials and agency partners stopped treating "city" as a legal technicality and started using it as the default word in headlines, social captions, and pitch materials. Consistency, not cleverness, did the heavy lifting.
Does Language Actually Affect Site Selection and Investment?
Yes, and the research is more specific than most economic developers assume. Academic work on business site selection finds that place image, meaning brand, visual identity, and reputation, has a measurable, direct effect on where companies choose to locate once a location already clears the basic operational boxes: labor supply, infrastructure, tax structure. In other words, when two communities are functionally similar, the one that reads as more capable wins the next look.
That effect shows up in industry data too. City brand analysis from City Nation Place links perception scores directly to capital investment, talent migration, and tourism outcomes, with even modest perception gains correlating to meaningfully higher investment flows. Perception isn't a soft metric sitting next to the real numbers. It's an input to the real numbers.
A community that reads as small, quiet, or hidden gets filtered out early, often before anyone checks the actual data on labor force, incentives, or infrastructure. Site selectors and relocating executives use language as a first-pass heuristic long before they build a spreadsheet.
That filtering matters most in three groups:
- Site selectors, who eliminate candidates from long lists using surface-level research before ever requesting a formal RFP response.
- Relocating employees and executives, who search a city's name and form an impression from the first three headlines that come back.
- Investors and developers, who read "town" as a signal of limited scale, and "city" as a signal worth a closer look.
How to Audit Your Community's Language
Run this audit before you touch a logo or hire a designer. It costs nothing but staff time, and it usually surfaces more inconsistency than anyone expects.
- Pull every public-facing asset. Website copy, social bios, press releases, the chamber's about page, tourism brochures, and your economic development pitch deck all count.
- Flag the words that undersell you. Search specifically for "town," "small," "quaint," "hidden gem," and "close-knit community." Each instance is a candidate for revision, not an automatic deletion.
- Apply a keep, modify, or replace rubric. Keep the word if it's accurate and strategic (a historic downtown really can be "quaint"). Modify it if it's close but imprecise ("small business friendly" instead of "small town"). Replace it if it actively undercuts scale ("town" almost always becomes "city").
- Rewrite the highest-traffic assets first. Your homepage headline, your top economic development one-pager, and any materials handed to corporate site selectors or relocation prospects should be first in line, since those documents get the earliest and widest read.
- Standardize a style guide. Put the accepted terms in writing so the next staff member, intern, or agency partner doesn't drift back into old habits.
A homepage that reads "Welcome to our charming small town" next to a corporate pitch that reads "a growing city of 120,000" sends conflicting signals in the same afternoon of research. That inconsistency is often more damaging than either version alone, because it makes the reader wonder which description is actually true. A well-built municipal website functions as a recruiting tool, and recruiting tools don't get to contradict themselves.
Pro Tip: Search your own site with the phrase "small town" in quotes before you do anything else. What comes back is usually older than you think, and it's often the exact page a site selector or reporter lands on first.
How to Roll Out the New Language Across Your Community
Language changes fail when one department updates its copy and everyone else keeps the old script. Treat this as a coordination project, not a copywriting task.
Start by getting buy-in from the mayor's office, the chamber, the tourism bureau, and any Main Street or downtown authority in the same room, agreeing on the same three or four core descriptors before anyone edits a single page. Update priority assets in this order: homepage and meta descriptions, economic development one-pagers, social media bios, then press release templates and event signage. Set a 90 day cadence to catch anything missed in the first pass.
Track results over a 6 to 18 month window, not a quarter. Watch site selector inquiries, relocation page traffic, chamber membership inquiries, and earned media mentions that use "city" language without prompting.
- Assign one owner to approve final copy across departments.
- Brief tourism, economic development, and Main Street partners on the same day, not sequentially.
- Amplify the new language through social channels built for economic development audiences, where consistency compounds fastest.
- Log every mention in outside press or site selector correspondence that adopts your preferred terms.
| Step | Action |
|---|---|
| Align stakeholders | Get mayor's office, chamber, and tourism bureau agreeing on core language in one meeting. |
| Update priority assets | Rewrite homepage, EDO pitch decks, and social bios quickly. |
| Track adoption | Watch inquiries and earned media over 6 to 18 months for organic use of city language. |
Why word choice outweighs budget increases
Rural and metro-adjacent communities routinely undersell themselves out of habit, not strategy. Nobody sits in a planning meeting and decides to sound smaller than they are. It happens by inertia, old copy nobody revisits, a tourism slogan written a decade ago, a chamber bio that still calls a city of six figures a "tight-knit town."
The research is consistent on this point: place image affects site selection whenever operational fundamentals are already comparable, and a small perception gain correlates with outsized gains in capital investment. That means a communications fix, done right, can outperform a modest incentive package. But it only works when it's tied to something real, Amplify BA's five year capital campaign is the credibility behind Broken Arrow's new tone, not a substitute for it. Communities that want the same lift should expect to do the work in parallel: fix the language, and keep making the investments that make the language true.
— Damien Denmark
Get a Language and Brand Audit for Your Community
Southwind Marketing runs exactly the kind of audit this article describes, and we can usually turn a full language and messaging review around faster than a community can staff it internally. Where a traditional agency might spend weeks scoping a rebrand, our audit process pairs directly with our work in economic development marketing, so you get findings and a prioritized fix list, not just a slide deck.
For communities that want the full picture, we also build municipal and EDO websites that carry the new language consistently from the homepage down to the site selector landing pages, and we set up Southwind Connect℠ so chambers and EDOs can keep stakeholders, partners, and prospects updated as the rebrand rolls out. None of this replaces real investment in your community. It makes sure your language stops undercutting the investment you're already making. Start with a language audit request through our economic development marketing page and get a prioritized list back before your next council meeting.
Sources
- About Broken Arrow | City of Broken Arrow
- Dissertation: Place image and business site selection (Cleveland State University archive)
- How city brands drive economic growth in North America | City Nation Place
- Broken Arrow unveils new logo, throws block party to revitalize 'New Orleans Square' (KTUL)
FAQ
Can changing one word really change how a city is perceived?
Yes, when it's applied consistently across every public asset and backed by real investment. Broken Arrow paired its city language shift with projects like New Orleans Square and Amplify BA, giving the new tone something concrete to stand on.
How long does a language shift take to show results?
Plan on a 6 to 18 month window to see measurable change in site selector inquiries, relocation traffic, or earned media adoption of the new terms. Language changes fast; outside perception catches up slower.
What words should a growing city stop using?
Audit for "town," "small," "quaint," "hidden gem," and "close-knit community" across your website, pitch decks, and social bios, then decide case by case whether each word still fits your actual size and growth.
Does this apply to small or rural communities too?
The same audit works at any size, but the goal isn't to always sound bigger. It's to make sure your language matches your real scale, growth, and investment rather than defaulting to humility out of habit.
Who should lead a community's language audit?
Whoever owns the highest-traffic public assets, usually the chamber, EDO, or tourism office, should lead it, but the mayor's office and any Main Street or downtown authority need to sign off on the same core terms. Southwind Marketing can run this process end to end for communities that want an outside audit.