The San Antonio Chamber of Commerce will once again use “Greater” in its name, the organization announced Thursday at its annual membership meeting.
The chamber dropped the adjective around 2012, said interim President and CEO Dave Peterson. The thinking at the time was that the chamber wanted to be seen as approachable and not “aggrandizing” compared to San Antonio’s other, smaller chambers.
Restoring “Greater” is an attempt to capture the growth of the chamber and its goals of becoming a more regional player in its business advocacy, said Katie Harvey, founder and CEO of KGBTexas and the chamber’s board chair.
Besides that, she said, “Everyone still continued to call us ‘Greater.'”
The move comes as local chambers are working to recalibrate their efforts in the wake of the pandemic. San Antonio is not the only city whose chambers are in flux. Earlier this month, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce and Opportunity Austin, the chamber’s economic development initiative, announced they were splitting after two decades.
In 2021, San Antonio’s Economic Development Foundation became Greater:SATX Regional Economic Partnership, to emphasize its expanded focus on the entire San Antonio region. In March, Greater:SATX announced a partnership with Opportunity Austin, to advocate for what some are calling a “mega-region” along the Interstate 35 corridor.
The San Antonio Chamber’s rebooted name comes with a new logo in which the word “commerce” is now lowercase and surrounded by brackets. The dynamic version of the logo allows the chamber to swap out “commerce” for other words, such as “advocacy,” “people” and “collaboration,” and phrases like “having fun” and “member success.”
“We’re not just a Chamber of Commerce,” said Harvey. “Commerce is one thing. We are a chamber of advocacy, insights, intelligence, growth — all of those different things. And we recognize that the word … commerce is a little bit, maybe, outdated.”
The goal is to “appeal to a younger, fresher demographic,” she said.
Here are some of the new variations of branding:
Before the pandemic hit, a membership campaign pushed the number of members to about 2,100, Peterson said; now the group has about 1,750 members.
The rebranding is part of the chamber’s three-year strategic plan, which was developed in the wake of its leadership restructuring last year.
The chamber paused that effort as it sought to merge with the North San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, a move that came in response to a survey of members. Nearly 80% of those surveyed said there were too many chambers of commerce in San Antonio.
The San Antonio area has at least 10 chambers, and several more representing local municipalities like Alamo Heights, Boerne, New Braunfels and Schertz-Cibolo-Selma. The smaller chambers in San Antonio tend to focus on niche memberships, defined by race and ethnicity, gender and even religious affiliation.
Rebranding was put on hold as the chambers tried to find enough common ground to join forces. The timing seemed right. Neither chamber had a permanent CEO; the North Chamber’s Cristina Aldrete and San Antonio Chamber’s Richard Perez, both stepped down late last year.
But the North Chamber — which represents “more than 1,200 member businesses from every quadrant in the city,” according to its website — ultimately declined to join forces.
Danny Zimmerman, chairman of the North Chamber’s board, told the San Antonio Report on Wednesday that the chambers “just couldn’t get on the same page relative to our different constituencies.”
The North Chamber, he said, is focused on “Main Street,” which he defined as mid-sized and small businesses. He said the San Antonio Chamber is perceived by the North Chamber as being too close to city officials, which “tends over the years to influence the advocacy” of that chamber.
The North Chamber too, will be rebranding in the coming months, he said, to better reflect that the organization no longer only represents businesses in a single geographic area of San Antonio. While its members can be found all over the city, Zimmerman said the North Chamber is focused on northern Bexar County.
He said the chamber will be launching its own CEO search “within the next two weeks.”
The Greater San Antonio Chamber’s CEO search is ongoing, Harvey said; it has retained a national search firm and also is looking locally.
She expressed regret that the two chambers couldn’t find common ground to merge, and said she still believes doing so would have been in the best interest of San Antonio as a whole.
Both chambers spoke of the growing recognition that their business advocacy should be regional rather than narrowly focused. That was the impetus of the South and West San Antonio chambers merging into the South Texas Business Partnership in 2020. Led by CEO and President Rebecca Viagran, the new group is focused on the entire South Texas region.
The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s first to specifically serve Hispanic business, is big enough, at roughly 900 members, to be considered one of the “big three” in San Antonio, along with the Greater and North chambers.
President and CEO Marina Gonzales said that while she’s heard the call for consolidation, she thinks current collaboration among the chambers fulfills that need. She noted that the Greater Chamber and the Hispanic Chamber now share responsibility for Leadership San Antonio, a program that helps develop local leaders.
“We complement each other,” she said. “I think what makes [San Antonio] unique is our culture and community.” The way to continue “is to have strong chambers that work together.”
KGBTexas and the North San Antonio Chamber of Commerce are financial supporters of the San Antonio Report. For a full list of business members, click here.
