An Exceptional Quality of Life

Art, music, theatrical plays, beaches, fishing, boating, hiking, skiing, professional sports … New Jersey has it all.

By Richard Skelly, Contributing Writer  On Jul 27, 2015

It is precisely because New Jersey has so many artistic, cultural, recreational and outdoor endeavors to pursue here that our quality of life is exceptional.

For lovers of art and culture, the state offers more than 150 museums, including the Princeton Art Museum, The Newark Museum, The Morris Museum in Morristown, The Montclair Art Museum and the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton. For those who enjoy the performing arts, concerts, ballets, operas and Broadway shows, these can be seen at venues such as The New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark, the BergenPAC in Englewood, State Theatre in New Brunswick, the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank, the McCarter Theater in Princeton and Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn.

Large-venue rock concerts are always on hand at Newark’s Prudential Center, PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel and the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden.

For professional sports, the state is proud to be the home of the National Football League’s New York Giants and New York Jets at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford. For hockey enthusiasts, the Prudential Center is home to the National Hockey League’s New Jersey Devils. There is also an array of minor league baseball stadiums, and, for horse-racing enthusiasts, there are tracks such as Meadowlands Racetrack, Monmouth Park Race Track and Freehold Raceway.

For those interested in organic wine making or polo, New Jersey has the vineyards and available horse farms for those pursuits. If one’s interest is golf, the state offers more than 300 public and private golf facilities.

An abundance of healthy saltwater and freshwater fishing opportunities exist here, especially along the state’s 130-mile stretch of pristine coastline. Camping, rock climbing, hiking, swimming, vegetable gardening and pick-your-own fruit farms … these venues can be easily found here in the Garden State, says Anthony Minick, marketing director and acting director for the New Jersey Division of Travel and Tourism.

“Promoting tourism in the state post-Sandy has been going extremely well,” Minick says. “Tourism revenues in 2014 grew to a record $42.1 billion, and that was up 3.8 percent from the prior year, so tourism is doing extremely well in New Jersey,” he explains.

“Everything we do in travel and tourism is based on quality research,” Minick continues, and what executives at Travel and Tourism have discovered is “the majority of our customers come from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

“So, we decided that it is a lot easier and more cost-effective to market to customers who already know and are happy with our product. We are also marketing to western Pennsylvania a bit and to the Baltimore/ Washington, DC areas as well.”

While many people remember the “Stronger than the Storm” campaign, the state launched a new campaign last year titled “New Jersey, We’re For You.”

Additionally, new digital and Internet-based marketing efforts, all surrounding www.visitNJ.org, have saved the state thousands of advertising dollars, while conventional efforts like billboard, radio and TV advertising continue in neighboring states and parts of Canada.

“We know that the majority of people travel to a given state based on interest, and that’s how we market New Jersey. These people like to fish, they like ecotourism, they like to bird watch, they like beaches. The great thing about New Jersey – and that’s why the campaign ‘New Jersey, We’re For You’ works so well – is that there really is something for everybody,” he says.

“We’re drawing millions of visitors to our website with all types of e-mail and banner campaigns and video. When we talk about our segmentation strategy and the fact that visitors come to an area based on their interest, we’re able to get intelligence about these groups,” he says, noting, “we can serve up advertisements to groups that are interested in specific activities. This has lowered the cost of doing business for us.

“I’m not the economic development guru for New Jersey, but part of the reason employees want to move to a state is because of quality of life. We know that New Jersey has good culture and good arts, and that’s why I believe so many people love New Jersey and stay here. We have a variety of things to do and a variety of attractions, and that makes our state very marketable from an economic development standpoint,” Minick says. “The whole state is a hidden gem as far as I’m concerned.”

 

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