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A Big Seller
Dig pays off for some as new marketing tool

By Raphael Lewis, Globe Staff
Friday, July 6, 2001

A decade ago, when construction workers crawled beneath downtown Boston to begin the Central Artery-Ted Williams Tunnel project, it was clear their work would profoundly alter life in New England.

After all, they don't call it the Artery for nothing. Coursing north-south through Boston like an asphalt aorta, the highway provides the most crucial channel to the region's heart.

But as the men and women undertaking the $14.2 billion project set out to bury one of the region's worst traffic nightmares, they unearthed something valuable in the process: A marketing juggernaut.

In the past few years, the nickname for the project - the Big Dig - has not only become a synonym for traffic detours, budget-busting cost overruns, and mind-numbing complexity, it has become a brand name as well.

From ice cream to bicycles, music to toys, the Big Dig has transcended its engineering and construction roots to become a shorthand phrase that conveys to consumers that a product is tough, Boston-to-the-core, and cutting-edge.

"It's a definite focus of people's attention these days," said Watson Reid, whose band, Dr. Watson Reid and Americana, will release "The Big Dig" later this summer, an album that features a song of the same name. "I think it's a name and a tune that will catch people's interest. It's on the tip of everyone's tongue."

The Big Dig has become so hot that four area businesses and entrepreneurs have sought to trademark the term to claim exclusive rights to the project's marketability, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office in Washington.

Brigham's Ice Cream of Arlington did so in 1998, after it introduced its Big Dig flavor on a trial basis and found legions of hungry fans. Filled with hunks of dark chocolate, brownies, and caramel, "it was meant to signify all the junk and crap being dug up by the Big Dig," said a spokeswoman, Beryl Rodewald.

"It's our eighth most popular flavor" out of 18, she added.

David Guerra chose The Big Dig as the name for a dance club he plans to open at an undetermined site in Boston a year from now, because the title conveys an image of the city's future.

"In this business, you have to align yourself with the cosmos and line up with the trends," said Guerra, who filed for a trademark in 1998. "We want to go with it."

The International Bicycle Center of Allston chose The Big Dig as the name for a new, superdurable bike it introduced last year because it wanted "something that exuded the toughness that bike couriers put up with every day around here."

"It's a good name and it captures the essence of the bicycle," said a spokesman, Craig Gaulzetti, who said the company has sold 20 of the bikes, which cost as much as $2,000.

But as catchy as "the Big Dig" is, no one seems to know who coined the phrase, and who can take credit for the consumer powerhouse the project has spawned.

The first popular usage of the words to describe Boston's massive highway project occurred 13 years ago in the pages of the Globe, when reporter Peter J. Howe told readers about a program soon to air on WGBH-TV entitled "Will Boston Survive the Big Dig?"

The program, a three-hour live forum that aired March 30, 1988, was hosted by Christopher Lydon, who at the time was a news anchor for WGBH. But Lydon says he does not remember who titled the show, recalling only that neither he nor his cohost, Carmen Fields, was responsible. WGBH officials spent a day searching for the answer last week, but came up emptyhanded. Howe says he, too, has no clue.

Fred Salvucci, the former transportation secretary who helped shepherd the Central Artery project into reality, said he has no idea.

"I don't know where 'The Big Dig' came from, but I do know that we on the project had nothing to do with it," Salvucci said. "It could be that show on public television. I don't know. I just know that it wasn't around in 1987 because we were trying very hard to come up with something less bureaucratic than the Central Artery/Tunnel project. We knew that wasn't going to catch on."

If the Big Dig is such a marketable name, why didn't officials on the financially challenged project seek to trademark it themselves?

"Unfortunately, because we're a public project, you have to go by your legally, governmentally approved name, which is the Central Artery/Tunnel project," said Sean O'Neill, a spokesman who, it so happens, has a marketing background.

"We can't trademark something that isn't ours. We looked into it, believe me."

At least the project staked a cyber claim at www.bigdig.com, where curious fans and annoyed drivers can check in on the latest "dirt" on the Dig. But entrepreneurs still managed to wheedle their way into virtual competition with the project. A search engine owned by Diagramics.com has set up shop at www.thebigdig.com. And a Randolph wedding/dance band named after the Central Artery project has found a home at www.thebigdig.net.

Dan McNichol, a former Central Artery employee who now makes a living solely off writing and lecturing about the project, says he is living proof of the appetite for anything Big Dig-related.

"We printed 15,000 copies of my book and it sold out in eight weeks," said McNichol, who conducts sold-out tours of the project. His book, "The Big Dig," was number one on the Globe's regional bestseller list this year, and he has a new book, called "The Big Dig at Night," coming out next month.

Barnes & Noble bookstores have created a chocolate bar called The Big Dig to help market the new tome, and stores as far away as New Hampshire carry them, said a spokeswoman, Lynne Nybo.

"It's a cottage industry," McNichol said.

Of course, Boston's Big Dig is hardly the first. Headline writers looking for catchy phrases have tagged public works projects in the United States and elsewhere with "the Big Dig" for decades, including the English Channel Tunnel. Even projects as small as the new $5.3 million Chamber of Commerce center in Little Rock, Ark., have earned the moniker.

But only Boston's Big Dig stuck.

"We're no longer stunned and amazed by the marketability of the Big Dig," O'Neill said. He theorized that "The Big Dig" emerged from the collective Boston mind, and that "No one person can take credit for it. It has proliferated to everything from calendars and T-shirts to cookies. It's nuts."

O'Neill added that public policy historians should take note of the Big Dig's sales power. With cost overruns an inherent part of the project's identity, the Central Artery project could have benefited from its nickname, he said.

"Public projects like ours should seriously consider the potential and marketability of their project," O'Neill said. "We have broken ground in many areas of construction and engineering, and it looks like we broke ground on this, too."