The Prospect of Being Overrun

A few months ago a friend told our Rotary Club that 17% of all of the new apartments then under construction in North Carolina were within two miles of Duke University here in Durham.

It brought to mind a comment a professor made to that same group twenty-five years earlier.

I had just been hired during my former career to jump start Durham’s community marketing agency and after his speech, Dr. Clay Hamner, a professor at the Fuqua School of Business who also co-developed Brightleaf Square was asked what we were going to do with all of the hotels under construction.

“We should blow up half of them,” he quipped in a chacteristic growl.

Hotel developers back then, without a local destination marketing organization generating data to inform feasibility studies, were prone to use and reuse the same studies of forecasted supply and demand, even if horribly outdated.

Risky, but you would be surprised how often projects, even today, come out of the ground without factoring changes in supply, perhaps even some of these residential complexes.

Sitting in the audience that day, I knew we were already correcting that condition by providing Durham-specific market research but I also knew that we would fill many of those new guest rooms by retrieving Durham visitors who through misinformation at the time were being misdirected to stay in other communities.

The same thing will happen with all of the new apartments opening in Durham, many of which are downtown in developments inspired by Clay and his partner Terry Sanford Jr. when they set the adaptive reuse standard here more than three decades ago.

In other words, many people who will rent those apartments probably meant to be in Durham all along but were dissuaded by Realtors elsewhere or by water-cooler folk tales that it wasn’t cool enough (or safe enough.)

The same is true of all of the new hotels opening downtown.  Hotels don’t generate demand, they harvest it.

Think about it.  People don’t wake up in the morning thinking they want to go and stay in a hotel.  They stay in a hotel because it is in the destination and near the things they want to visit.

But many of the visitors who will stay downtown have probably been coming here for related reasons, but for lack of options had been overnighting elsewhere in Durham or even further away because a certain level of lodging was full here.

But relocating these visitors and renters is only the beginning of the process of “onboarding” them.  The fact that they were susceptible to misinformation in the first place, means they will take a good while before fully embracing Durham values.

After she read a recent post of mine entitled Mitigating Halloween and Our Obsession with Risk, a neighbor asked me if Durham is in danger of being overrun.

On our listserv, a group of longer established neighbors had unsuccessfully tried to reason with some newer arrivals set on blocking off streets.

To no avail, these neighbors were trying to “onboard” the newer arrivals to intrinsic Durham values such as being open and welcoming.

Self-righteousness prevailed.

The challenge any community marketing agency has, such as the three I led during my now-concluded career, is not just to draw anyone and everyone to visit and live here (more than 80% of newcomers secretly shop a community first as a visitor) but to help prospects make the decision that is right for them, even if it isn’t the community you represent.

That’s not only good business because it leads to higher customer satisfaction, but it also protects a community’s sense of place from being overrun by people who won’t like it here or aren’t apt to appreciate and adopt the core traits and values that distinguish it.

It is also why it never makes sense to lead promotional efforts off with mainstream facilities and events which, by nature, are not distinctive or authentically representative of a particular place, even to the people drawn to them, because they are identical to those in hundreds of other places.

It is also the reason any community’s best cultural investment is in a local history museum.  Researchers have found that these places uniquely give children, students, visitors and newcomers, including relocating executives a place to get in touch with a community’s story, a sense of its soul, and its “there” there.

This is the best investment in community attachment and sense of place any community can make.  As a side benefit, history museums also draw participation from the same proportion of visitors to a community as facilities for performing arts or sports events do.

If and when Durham finally builds a museum fully capable of showcasing Durham’s history, it will uniquely interpret that one of the organic values Durhamites have is being drawn to people who are diverse rather than to tribes who are just like they are.

It is the latter that has led to bigotry in many places over the years as well as the wholesale homogenization of many communities.

Certainly not everyone drawn to Durham or even born here is in synch with Durham.  I’ve even known several elected to high office over the years as well as counterparts in other areas of economic development who weren’t.

This isn’t just because political campaigns often focus on what’s wrong with a community or because some people in these roles view themselves as the “cavalry,” but because they just don’t value or even sense Durham’s intrinsic distinctiveness.

It was easy for me.

It was part of my job to tease out and leverage what makes places distinctive so I became a quick study on which communities would be a good fit for me.

We’re living in a time of downtown revitalizations across the nation and nowhere is that more evident than in Durham.  But experts fear that in the process most are in danger of simply becoming playgrounds for the well-to-do erasing the socio-economic diversity that gave them appeal in the first place.

There may be a fine line, as I am quoted as saying, between organic and funky and merely seedy, but there is an even finer line between being authentic and merely a shell of a real place.

The former attributes in each case are hallmarks of sustainable sense of place.

As I read the new book entitled The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman, a quote by famed jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis kept crossing my mind.

In an interview here on NPR’s The State of Things, when asked why he and his family chose to move to Durham, Marsalis responded eloquently with one of the values and traits that has made Durham distinctive since its founding.

"Durham is everything I ever wanted in a City. It's fair…You can find everything… people who are wealthy, people who are not wealthy, blue collar workers, white collar workers, farmers.

They are all hanging out together. You go in the grocery store and you see people talking. It's not like the farmers on one corner and the lawyers are in one corner. In Durham, you don't have those stringent class lines."

In his book, Dunkelman identifies this trait as crucial to a sense of community and the ability to coordinate, not with cliques or inner circles, but across class and racial distinctions with those with whom we may not always agree.

In one part of his book, there is a brief history of how communities evolved in America, the anchor of what early observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville saw as key to our exceptional nature.

Dunkelman’s book weaves together numerous other studies and books over the years and he reminded me of one I read in the early 1980s by Dr. Claude S. Fischer entitled To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City.

It was about the time I first read Wallace Stegner’s essay coining the term The Sense of Place and among the earliest influences I had in getting my head around how communities evolve organically and how even landscape and other traits help shape them and make them distinct from those even close by.

One was scientific, the other lyrical and combined they led me to my first grasp of community attachment and what made some communities worth loving and visiting and others not so much.

Today, sociological researchers such as Dr. Jeni Cross at Colorado State University focus on unwrapping sense of place and its relationship to attachment.

Cross breaks our relationship to a particular place down into biographical (historical and familial,) spiritual (emotional and intangible,) ideological (moral and ethical,) narrative (mythical,) commoditized (image of desirable physical traits) and dependent (when someone has no choice.)

She finds a cohesive sense of rootedness and attachment with ideological, spiritual and biographical.  The tragedy of becoming cool is that many drawn last in by that attribute alone will also be first out, leaving sense of place diminished. 

In the words of Wendell Berry, another of my influences, most will be boomers vs. stickers.

If Durham’s sense of place is sooner or later overrun, it won’t be solely the fault of poor public policy or gentrification gone amuck or blocking off streets by helicopter parents but because, as Dunkelman explains, the social architecture of communities is in transformation.

Preserving what makes Durham Durham is not just the job of politicians or agencies, even ones such as DCVB which is charged as a guardian.

It certainly won’t be about “thinking big” or “monumental” or “institutional,” all of which in the words of Jane Jacobs “have the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery” and deaden places.

It will also not be just about preservation or change but rather how a community blends both.

It will all come down to how badly grass roots individuals and groups want to keep coordinating across differences to find Durham solutions to Durham problems, just as those founders did and generations have done for decades.

New Analysis of Brand Engagement

For each of the last four years, ComBlu, a Chicago-based company has analyzed the effectiveness of a wide range of businesses, across many industries including a few that are really parts of sectors.

The objective of all of this work is to benchmark effectiveness of engaging customers before, during and after purchases through a mix of branded online presence and communities such as various form of social media.  It is also designed to raise the level of professionalism.

ComBlu “broadly identifies community as an engagement ecosystem” that includes “offline conversations, social networks, review sites, gated brand communities and content hubs.”  The newly released report analyzes and rates 92 major businesses across 15 economic sectors and their engagement across 219 online communities.

Community-destination marketing organizations (DMOs,) where I spent a nearly 40-year career spanning three different cities, are “content hubs” at their core.

These DMOs are advocacy organizations which also aggregate, curate (a term used by the authors) and make searchable the natural, built and cultural place-based assets of their respective destination communities including visitor-related (many of whom will evolve into newcomers who almost always visit first) businesses, organizations, events, activities and features in a potential destination.

ComBlu believes that consumers seek information in as many as 10 different places before making a buying decision, and other studies show that “official” hubs such as community-destination marketing organizations, when not member-driven, are considered among the most reliable used.

Community DMOs are well advised by a statement in the report citing that:

“a social-only strategy is an incomplete line of attack, as is a “branded community-only” approach. The two are symbiotic and contribute to overall engagement. It is important for brands to understand what to do where and optimize the natural leverage between the owned and social infrastructure.”

A few communities such as Durham, NC, where I live, understand that safeguarding a destination community’s identity and reputation has always been a core element of community-destination marketing.

Even before the advent of the Internet, these community brand managers heeded the report’s admonition that organizations “need to both own the place where conversation happens AND be present in places outside their gated properties where people are talking.” To this I will add the fact that they also need to know when to intervene or to enlist the aid of the 6%-8% of internal and external audiences who, according to the study, are potentially proactive advocates.

The 1,100 community-destination marketing organizations in North America are not represented in the report’s analysis, but several industries which are part of the tourism sector are, including eight entertainment businesses, five beverage businesses, nine retailers, seven consumer product businesses, three hotel chains and three airlines, nearly 40% of all those evaluated.

At one point in the report, the analysis accurately implies that because people travel only because of the places they visit, the entities that get them to the destinations or provide a place to stay or something to do are “missing a huge opportunity to crowdsource” information about the overall destinations in which they are specifically located or to which they serve rather than just about their specific businesses.

The authors of the report astutely theorize that the percentage of businesses with cohesive strategies may have dropped this year (to 37% overall and 17% among hotels and airlines) because companies are experimenting and innovating.

I have always valued the report because it identifies and monitors not only 33 “best practices” and their rate of adoption both overall and among rock-star businesses, but it also points out five “worst practices” that are still lingering in the strategies of far too many businesses and organizations:

• Worst Practice #1: Moderating comments, stories and photos before posting.

 

• Worst Practice #2: Asking for information at registration and promising…pertinent content and never delivering…

 

• Worst Practice #3: …leaving up hopelessly outdated content…[on the web]

 

• Worst Practice #4: Having a banner calling out “what’s new” and never having anything new listed.

 

• Worst Practice #5: Asking community members to submit their success stories but not disclosing the criteria for selection or qualification…

Click here to download the full report released this month including the “best practices.”

Social Giant “Linked In” discovers Durham, North Carolina!

Thanks to Durham’s community/destination marketing organization (DMO) and its corps of Durham Image Watchers, social media-giant Linked In has finally corrected its database of locations for user profiles to include Durham, North Carolina, one of the most highly rated in America.

Previously people who live or work in Durham were forced to use the name of a jointly-owned airport, Raleigh-Durham, as their profile location. I suspect that Linked In had been given a faulty list of cities such as most airlines use, which is a mix and match perversion of cities and airport names.

As a former Mayor of Durham repeatedly explained, “there is simply no such place as Raleigh-Durham.”  It’s simply the name of an airport, located in the center of a polycentric area and midway between and co-owned by two distinct cities and counties and two distinct metro areas.

The list of locations Linked In used at inception obviously wasn’t subtle enough to grasp that Durham and Raleigh are very distinct cities let alone different MSAs or they tried to guess what the general area is called and missed that too.

A business as apparently savvy as Linked In isn’t interested in general areas anyway.  They must be familiar with any number of studies which show that nearly 8 out of every 10 people prefer to characterize where they work or live by the name of a specific city, town or county followed by a small percentage who prefer neighborhood and tiny sliver who are okay being lumped into large general areas.

To its credit Linked In made the correction but they could have made it easier for users by using a simple list of zip codes to make the change.  Instead users, if they are even aware of the improvement, are now left to individually fight through the instructions which have been inserted as one of the images in this blog post.

Or follow these steps:

- Go to the “Help Center” link at the bottom of your Linked In page

- Click on “Manage Account Settings”

- View personal info by clicking on the “Settings” link

- Click on “edit your name, location and industry”

- Click on Durham, North Carolina as location

Durham’s DMO the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau was just being diligent in its role as a DMO, but unfortunately for other communities, many DMOs never pay attention when oversights or mistaken identities occur which greatly marginalize if not entirely negate any effectiveness they have in promoting their communities.

Without addressing the ways in which a community’s brand is being misused or undermined, any other marketing is pretty much like trying to put a forest fire out with a garden hose hooked to only a rain barrel.

There may even be a few DMOs that sit on their hands knowing the community on the front end of the hyphen will be the only one remaining when the reference is inevitably truncated.  They probably don’t realize that the gain, even through omission, is still unethical.

Hyphenations are anathema to community brands but especially one like Raleigh-Durham which, unlike others, isn’t even in alphabetical order. I’ll leave the unethical behavior that reversed the order for another post.  We certainly don’t want any “eye-rollers” to cramp up.  The fact is, vigilance requires defending a brand at every “touch-point.”

Rectifying things like this doesn’t take a lot of resources, just persistence and vigilance and empowering internal stakeholders including local officials in the community to help out.

It can usually be done with a light touch but even though such a rectification is beneficial to all concerned, some sources get defensive and require some tough love.  Before Linked In, DCVB and Durham Image Watchers persuaded Facebook to make the distinction between the airport and the actual communities.

I noticed recently that Durham’s largest and newest theater may be the #2 most-attended theater in the nation according to Pollster, but to Ticketmaster it is a “Raleigh” facility because the ticketing giant, like Time-Warner doesn’t grasp that what’s important to customers is the physical location of the event and facility not where Ticketmaster happens to maintain an office.

More than two decades ago, when Durham first jumpstarted its DMO, one of the first things that organization did was to clean up misidentification in thousands of print directories, maps, travel and convention reference guides as well as datelines in news sources.

There is no way that any level of promotion by a DMO can ever hope to overcome misinformation such as this so there is no choice but to wade in and clean it up.  Then along came the Internet and the companies that populate navigation systems and the process started all over again.

About the time Durham’s DMO had the misinformation under control and in retreat, along came social media sites that ironically were re-infected by the same misinformation that had plagued hard-copy sources.

For example, the sources for community locations used by Groupon.com obviously don't grasp the meaning of “local” in many instances including Durham.  Lumping Durham with scores of other communities and metro areas misleads people instead into long commutes that burn more in gas than the coupons will save thus ripping off both the consumer and the outlet granting the coupon.

As any DMO goes about cleaning up or mitigating misinformation about a community, as Durham did, it may need to weather some condescension and obstinacy and grief from those who have benefited from the dissonance such as a Raleigh City Council member who publicly moaned “I’m not looking forward to being like Durham” only to be reassured in a Durham Herald-Sun editorial:

“don’t worry… Raleigh isn’t in imminent danger of having that much fun.”

Or the DMO may possibly have to weather some “friendly-fire” from those who may be under the spell of a few who seem in denial about this condescension or who feel they may benefit from obscuring community brands such some seem to think in the business of broadcast television.

But in time, any grousing, if well-intended and intellectually honest will come around to realizing that a strong community brand is no threat even to those who see the world from 30,000 feet up.

For any diligent DMO, the job of defending a community’s brand, which of course includes its identity, never ends but it is the equivalent of the expense of millions of dollars in marketing that would be literally neutralized if not wasted were the misinformation not rectified.

Retaining The Equity Of Tradition And Sense Of Place

An illustration of the economic value of sense-of-place and the importance of keeping a brand uncluttered and free from dilution is in the June 27th weekly issue of Sports Illustrated Magazine.

In a day and age when naming rights, sponsorships and advertisements are ubiquitous, in an article entitled All That Glitters Isn’t Sold, journalist and author L. Jon Wertheim takes just more than a page to remind us that there is another way to succeed.

When asked by Wertheim why the Wimbledon Championships brand remains pure and free of corporate logos, courtside billboards, rotating signs and luxury suites, a long-time tournament referee, Alan Mills, “responded with a confused look, ‘If we did that, I suppose it wouldn’t be Wimbledon, would it?’”

Noting that there is “equity in tradition” Wertheim finishes this excellent piece by writing - “Maybe the moral for sports properties is this: Sure, you can make money from selling your soul. But there’s also value in hanging on to it.”

Still, even as the effectiveness of advertising continues a steep, long-term decline, I suspect, just as Mike Golic has prophesied, greed and ego will conspire to wallpaper the uniforms of athletes in the near future much as they do race cars today.

Mr. Wertheim’s eloquence about this important aspect makes me wonder if Jon Wertheim, who grew up in Bloomington the child of an Indiana University, may have come across an essay by another IU professor, The Geography of Somewhere by Scott Russell Sanders.

If Ever Advertising Was Going To Be Able To Rehab Community Image–This Was It!

The reasons advertising doesn’t work to promote or rehabilitate the image of a community are legion including, to name just two, a lack of credibility (it is a community talking about itself) and it is long proven to merely harden or affirm both those who are already positive or negative.

But if advertising ever had a chance to work for this purpose, it was last month when Chrysler ran a spectacular television ad for its hometown Detroit on the biggest stage possible for advertising, during the Super Bowl.

The ad was also perfectly executed with authentic, genuine and compelling imagery, memorable background music and voice-over and emotive story-telling.

While unrealistic at this level for even the most adequately funded community/destination marketing effort, if advertising was ever going to work to change or rehabilitate community image, this could be it.

But it didn’t work.

Is this heresy from a past CLIO award winner for the television portion of the “Wild About Anchorage!” campaign, still in evidence there after nearly 30 years?

No, and I’ll explain why from the point of view of someone also fortunate enough to find a formula that helped turn around another community’s image.

But the Chrysler/Detroit ad probably didn’t hurt either.  What place wouldn’t treasure one of its big employers telling its story?

Before I explain my take in the bullets below, here are two excellent blogs from advertising and communication experts, one by Joan Sinopoli, Senior VP of Harris Interactive’s Brand and Communications and another by Laura Reis, President of Reis & Reis and author of Reis’ Pieces.

• Advertising doesn’t change minds.  Only a slow-build earned media effort based on solid, objective information and interlaced with relentless brand management including vigilant brand defense has the potential to sway opinions and change minds and it takes a long time.

 

• Image ads worked as public service announcements in Anchorage, because the community didn’t have an image problem.  It didn’t have an image at all so it just needed a little “wind”  to release pent up resident pride for which advertising can be perfect where, as in Anchorage at the time, there is little risk that it will spill over to harden negatives elsewhere.

 

• The Chrysler/Detroit ad may have been better suited, had it just been run in Detroit where community pride was recently benchmarked at 24% compared to 38% on average for the 26 communities studied in the three year Gallup/Knight Foundation poll - slightly higher than results from similar studies of resident pride in Raleigh and Charlotte.

 

• While the Chrysler/Detroit ad resonated primarily among Michiganders, even deployed there, studies show it would  probably have just hardened existing negative and positive perceptions.  Even an ad as excellent as this one is just too blunt an instrument to sway opinions.  But at home is where Detroit must first improve perceptions.

 

• The 24% pride level in Detroit may be pushed a bit higher by the fact that it has loss of a fourth of its population over the past decade, if as surveys show, negatives are less attached to place.  To put Detroit and the communities benchmarked above in perspective, 91% of Durham residents are proud or very proud of their community, a 17 to 1 positive-to-negative ratio, compared to 1 to 1 ratios or less for the other communities.

 

• Durham’s image problem was both more complex and much less pervasive than Detroit’s.  While Detroit’s has apparently metastasized nationwide, Durham’s image problem was always centered in two nearby counties.  Durham’s national image was strong and primarily needed damage control and brand management to limit any contamination from or barriers presented by negative opinions in neighboring communities.

 

• Advertising is a bit like “friendly-fire” when it comes to community image.  Due to low credibility, it backfires with residents where pride, image and attachment are already high and with external populations, much to the consternation of those always drawn to big, showy ad campaigns, testing show that ads merely harden existing negatives and positives, even where there is a means to deploy it that precisely.

 

• With resident pride at 91%, Durham residents just needed affirmation and empowerment-communication tools such as the precision of earned media and a “perceived injustice” element to brand management and defense.

 

• Paid advertising has a role which is similar to the a “wind” that harvests inquiries from interest generated by the more rehabilitating and promotional “sun” of other tactics such as earned media and brand management.

 

I’ve deliberately over-simplified community image to issues of pride and negative or positive perceptions or image.  There are several other indicators such as aesthetic perceptions of appearance and sense of place, acceptance of other cultures, ethnicities and lifestyles and community engagement.

Everything begins though with sound marketing intelligence including scientific, generalizable research that pinpoints a community’s image both among internal and external audiences.  Every community has an image or perception issue, often below the false security of anecdotal expressions or proclamations by officials.

Only marketing intelligence can unwrap it.  Only marketing intelligence can benchmark any progress.  Only marketing intelligence can suggest what communications tactics or mix of tactics to use.