How a Startup DMO Reached the Pinnacle of Advertising

No one involved ever expected it to endure - let alone be acclaimed -but as it occurred this month, I still get a call about it every year or so over the more than three decades since our little campaign launched.

When concepted in 1980 and launched in 1981, the campaign was intended to last only a few years at best.  Those were the days before testing was feasible and we were just glad it worked.

It remains the only campaign by a community destination marketing organization (DMO) to win a full-blown CLIO award in the overall travel category.

Clio is the preeminent international award competition for the creative business.

The campaign, originally designed to run only as a public service announcement when there were only three TV stations was also recognized as one of the hundred best TV commercial that year.

Advertising Age, a magazine for marketing and media cited it as “A Significant Milestone in the use of Television Technics for Marketing Success.

More than half a lifetime ago, I was only 32 years old at the time and in the first decade of what would be a four-decade career as a DMO exec.  It didn’t sink in until years later how rare what we had achieved actually was.

Friends at Seattle-based Alaska Airlines had won a CLIO award a year earlier and seeing our little campaign’s potential encouraged its submission.

Of course, “I Love New York” as a state tourism campaign had won a CLIO three or four years earlier as did Michigan tourism a few years later.

Two other community DMOs have reached the short list or received bronze or silver recognition in the years since.

DMOs are nonprofit organizations with the in-house skillsets of commercial advertising, marketing and public relations agencies.

But instead of being generalists about a lot of different products and services, DMOs are established to specialize, day in and day out, in the safeguarding and leveraging of the brand of a particular location.

They are a means to draw and optimize visitor centric economic and cultural development for the communities they serve.

Think of DMOs as an inch wide and a mile deep compared to agencies-for-hire which, by nature, must be a mile wide and an inch deep in order to be relevant to many different types of businesses.

Another DMO I subsequently led before retiring went on to garner more than 100 other awards for marketing and best practices.  Still, none quite reached the acclaim achieved by that little spot we produced for Anchorage, Alaska in 1981.

Here is the story of how Wild About Anchorage came to be,  To my wonder, it still resonates there more than three decades later based on online comments.

When I arrived in mid-1978 to complete a three-year-old DMO start up for Anchorage, two of the major obstacles we faced were internal.

Statewide Alaskans backhanded Anchorage with the compliment that that “the best thing about Anchorage was that it was 15 minutes from Alaska.”

Yet research was showing that the amenities offered by Anchorage were important to potential visitors.

At the same time, Anchorage residents were skeptical toward tourism because having divided the state into stereotypes traditional long-haul tourism interests had pegged Anchorage as the overnight between Mt. McKinley and Prince William Sound.

Yet surveys and inventories had shown that Anchorage offered virtually every Alaskan experience in a shorter, less logistical and expensive trip without diverting travelers interested in some of those traditional itineraries.

We needed a communications vehicle that would illuminate Anchorage’s personality and serve to give voice to community pride, while establishing a platform from which we could build awareness of the community’s role in tourism.

During 1979, we tinkered with some print tourism ads headlined Anchorage & Anchorage juxtapositioning two side by side images, one featuring something iconic about Alaska such as wildlife and the other featuring an Anchorage amenity such as great dining.

While we knew it was too “straight up” or serious for the PSAs we wanted to run locally which would also reach the majority of Alaskans, we felt we could build on that positioning.

We were working with a small boutique agency at the time in Seattle which until we could develop organizational capacity was the only entity willing to produce our annual visitors guide including selling the advertising.

One day while discussing the campaign we wanted to create, I mentioned a Chevron commercial that had been created by Kurtz And Friends as an example that might work.

We knew straight up imagery wouldn't be as effective because Alaskans were over exposed to incredible photography.  We also needed something that wouldn’t take the community too seriously.

Tom Bardeen, one of the principles in the boutique, was familiar with Bob Kurtz, who had earned fame doing the titles for The Pink Panther and offered to see if he was interested in producing an animated spot for us on behalf Anchorage.

He was, and either Tom or Bob or maybe both fell on the idea of a chorus line of animals to convey the message that Anchorage & Anchorage had only in an animation format.

The spot took off instantly with not only Anchorage residents but Alaskans as a whole.  Still a decade before the worldwide web would be viable, I guess you could say it went viral.

Within weeks we knew the moose in the center of the chorus line would work as the graphic symbol in our branding of Anchorage for external audiences as would the tagline Wild About Anchorage.

Linda Chase, an event organizer, agreed to do costumes for an actual chorus line we could take on the road at promotions as well as use at local events and during welcome ceremonies for conventions.

A contest in schools gave the moose a name – Seymour of Anchorage – get it?

Tennys Owens, a local art gallery owner, arranged for sales of the original celluloids and residents lined up around the block to buy and frame them. I still have one the board gave me when I moved on.

A statuette of Seymour was created to give to awardees at award dinners.

I left Alaska in late 1987, but Wild About Anchorage remained in use for another 20 years.  In 2007 the Anchorage DMO successfully launched a new brand signature and the tagline “Big Wild Life.”

In 2011, after the Anchorage Daily News pined for Wild About Anchorage in a column, Seymour the Moose, himself, penned an open letter assuring readers that he was still working as a mascot of sorts for the new slogan (smile.)

Coming up with a magical campaign such as this is always a bit serendipitous by nature.

Testing can measure a lot of things including potential popularity, but usually not deep and enduring engagement over more than three decades.

Nor do DMO marketers or should I say DMO governing boards have the patience to let a campaign play out like Anchorage obviously did.  About the time it seems everyone on the planet must be heard of it is when a campaign is just starting to penetrate.

Little did we know then that by the end of that decade traditional advertising overall would begin a three decade decline in effectiveness.

In today’s marketing environment where ads now have a negative return on investment and channel fragmentation makes a PSA campaign impractical, it wouldn’t be possible to do what we achieved in 1981.

I am humbled that people still embrace Wild About Anchorage as a legacy campaign.  We were very lucky and I was blessed to play a part as the producer.

Hats off to Tom Bardeen who wrote the lyrics and Dale Case (101 Dalmatians and Fatherhood) and Pam Cooke (Family Guy and Simpsons) who did the animation and especially Bob Kurtz who designed and directed Wild About Anchorage.

How a Startup DMO Reached the Pinnacle of Advertising

No one involved ever expected it to endure - let alone be acclaimed -but as it occurred this month, I still get a call about it every year or so over the more than three decades since our little campaign launched.

When concepted in 1980 and launched in 1981, the campaign was intended to last only a few years at best.  Those were the days before testing was feasible and we were just glad it worked.

It remains the only campaign by a community destination marketing organization (DMO) to win a full-blown CLIO award in the overall travel category.

Clio is the preeminent international award competition for the creative business.

The campaign, originally designed to run only as a public service announcement when there were only three TV stations was also recognized as one of the hundred best TV commercial that year.

Advertising Age, a magazine for marketing and media cited it as “A Significant Milestone in the use of Television Technics for Marketing Success.

More than half a lifetime ago, I was only 32 years old at the time and in the first decade of what would be a four-decade career as a DMO exec.  It didn’t sink in until years later how rare what we had achieved actually was.

Friends at Seattle-based Alaska Airlines had won a CLIO award a year earlier and seeing our little campaign’s potential encouraged its submission.

Of course, “I Love New York” as a state tourism campaign had won a CLIO three or four years earlier as did Michigan tourism a few years later.

Two other community DMOs have reached the short list or received bronze or silver recognition in the years since.

DMOs are nonprofit organizations with the in-house skillsets of commercial advertising, marketing and public relations agencies.

But instead of being generalists about a lot of different products and services, DMOs are established to specialize, day in and day out, in the safeguarding and leveraging of the brand of a particular location.

They are a means to draw and optimize visitor centric economic and cultural development for the communities they serve.

Think of DMOs as an inch wide and a mile deep compared to agencies-for-hire which, by nature, must be a mile wide and an inch deep in order to be relevant to many different types of businesses.

Another DMO I subsequently led before retiring went on to garner more than 100 other awards for marketing and best practices.  Still, none quite reached the acclaim achieved by that little spot we produced for Anchorage, Alaska in 1981.

Here is the story of how Wild About Anchorage came to be,  To my wonder, still resonates there more than three decades later based on online comments.

When I arrived in mid-1978 to complete a three-year-old DMO start up for Anchorage, two of the major obstacles we faced were internal.

Statewide Alaskans backhanded Anchorage with the compliment that that “the best thing about Anchorage was that it was 15 minutes from Alaska.”

Yet research was showing that the amenities offered by Anchorage were important to potential visitors.

At the same time, Anchorage residents were skeptical toward tourism because having divided the state into stereotypes traditional long-haul tourism interests had pegged Anchorage as the overnight between Mt. McKinley and Prince William Sound.

Yet surveys and inventories had shown that Anchorage offered virtually every Alaskan experience in a shorter, less logistical and expensive trip without diverting travelers interested in some of those traditional itineraries.

We needed a communications vehicle that would illuminate Anchorage’s personality and serve to give voice to community pride, while establishing a platform from which we could build awareness of the community’s role in tourism.

During 1979, we tinkered with some print tourism ads headlined Anchorage & Anchorage juxtapositioning two side by side images, one featuring something iconic about Alaska such as wildlife and the other featuring an Anchorage amenity such as great dining.

While we knew it was too “straight up” or serious for the PSAs we wanted to run locally which would also reach the majority of Alaskans, we felt we could build on that positioning.

We were working with a small boutique agency at the time in Seattle which until we could develop organizational capacity was the only entity willing to produce our annual visitors guide including selling the advertising.

One day while discussing the campaign we wanted to create, I mentioned a Chevron commercial that had been created by Kurtz And Friends as an example that might work.

We knew straight up imagery wouldn't be as effective because Alaskans were over exposed to incredible photography.  We also needed something that wouldn’t take the community too seriously.

Tom Bardeen, one of the principles in the boutique, was familiar with Bob Kurtz, who had earned fame doing the titles for The Pink Panther and offered to see if he was interested in producing an animated spot for us on behalf Anchorage.

He was, and either Tom or Bob or maybe both fell on the idea of a chorus line of animals to convey the message that Anchorage & Anchorage had only in an animation format.

The spot took off instantly with not only Anchorage residents but Alaskans as a whole.  Still a decade before the worldwide web would be viable, I guess you could say it went viral.

Within weeks we knew the moose in the center of the chorus line would work as the graphic symbol in our branding of Anchorage for external audiences as would the tagline Wild About Anchorage.

Linda Chase, an event organizer, agreed to do costumes for an actual chorus line we could take on the road at promotions as well as use at local events and during welcome ceremonies for conventions.

A contest in schools gave the moose a name – Seymour of Anchorage – get it?

Tennys Owens, a local art gallery owner, arranged for sales of the original celluloids and residents lined up around the block to buy and frame them. I still have one the board gave me when I moved on.

A statuette of Seymour was created to give to awardees at award dinners.

I left Alaska in late 1987, but Wild About Anchorage remained in use for another 20 years.  In 2007 the Anchorage DMO successfully launched a new brand signature and the tagline “Big Wild Life.”

In 2011, after the Anchorage Daily News pined for Wild About Anchorage in a column, Seymour the Moose, himself, penned an open letter assuring readers that he was still working as a mascot of sorts for the new slogan (smile.)

Coming up with a magical campaign such as this is always a bit serendipitous by nature.

Testing can measure a lot of things including potential popularity, but usually not deep and enduring engagement over more than three decades.

Nor do DMO marketers or should I say DMO governing boards have the patience to let a campaign play out like Anchorage obviously did.  About the time it seems everyone on the planet must be heard of it is when a campaign is just starting to penetrate.

Little did we know then that by the end of that decade traditional advertising overall would begin a three decade decline in effectiveness.

In today’s marketing environment where ads now have a negative return on investment and channel fragmentation makes a PSA campaign impractical, it wouldn’t be possible to do what we achieved in 1981.

I am humbled that people still embrace Wild About Anchorage as a legacy campaign.  We were very lucky and I was blessed to play a part as the producer.

Hats off to Tom Bardeen who wrote the lyrics and Dale Case (101 Dalmatians and Fatherhood) and Pam Cooke (Family Guy and Simpsons) who did the animation and especially Bob Kurtz who designed and directed Wild About Anchorage.

Community Marketing In The Future

A business professor-friend of mind recently asked me to write about the long-term outlook for community destination marketing organizations, my four-decade career that ended at the dawn of 2010.

It will be a fun exercise.  Even though these organizations overall have continued to evolve over the last five years, the answer to his query can be found in the past, which is the primary source of all strategic insight.

When I reference this as “looking back to see forward,” I am not talking about the regressive propensity by some of my former DMO peers to react to changes in the tourism ecosystem by futilely trying to put humpty dumpty back together.

It is true, as some pundits predict, that “some” DMOs are already becoming irrelevant but not just because of technological advances.

Communities that have surrendered authenticity and sense of place while opting instead for mainstream mega-events and facilities are already obsolete.

Rather than differentiate, this approach homogenizes identity and character so that sooner rather than later there will be little need for a DMOs in these communities.

Those DMOs in communities that that still have and safeguard a unique sense place woven from distinctive cultural, built and natural place-based assets are and will still be highly relevant far into the future.

But to paraphrase futurist and analyst Brian Solis, in the future the marketing these community destination marketing organizations deploy will have little resemblance to marketing as it has been.

This isn’t and won’t just be about “keeping your knees bent” or better yet balancing for absorption as in the “bump method, aka, mogul skiing” to use metaphors from downhill skiing.

Interestingly, in the book forward to Share This Too, where Solis made that statement about “The future of marketing [having] little to do with marketing,”  he uses a comparison of the difference between surfing and skateboarding with snowboarding.

Describing that while they may look familiar, with the first two you lean back and use your back foot as a rudder.  But with snowboarding, you lean forward.

Change, even when it seems evolutionary requires not only “perseverance” but an “open mind” to doing things differently.

That said, marketing as most DMOs practice it began to rapidly change three decades ago, more than a decade before the Internet was made available commercially and nearly two decades before it was employed by even the most forward thinking DMOs.

While much of what a typical DMO does today will continue to be replaced in the future by technology, you can see what those that will still be relevant will be up to instead by looking at what all but the most strategic DMOs have long been neglecting.

Here is my take on eight (in no particular order) community destination marketing foci there that will always be a need for “boots on the ground” to optimize visitor-centric economic and cultural development even as more traditional elements of marketing continue to be commoditized by new technologies.

Serving as the vigilant conscience and guardian for the distinctive sense of place of a particular destination community – Perpetually justifying the unique value proposition: what’s special, what’s different.

Defending community reputation as a means of lowering barriers to visitation e.g. proactive fact-checking, ensuring accuracy even if troubling, protecting image, challenging negative stereotypes, drilling down to distill and celebrate inherent brand values, traits, positioning.

Conducting intensive and never-ending front line training about the community to optimize visitor satisfaction and circulation as well as training local stakeholders to optimize economic value added by “buying local.”

Leading the process for distilling strategic insight into what McKinsey’s Hugh Courtney identifies as the four levels of uncertainty including the “clear enough” near-term, “alternative futures” or scenarios a little further out, “a range of potential futures” in the distance and finally, patterns of evolution.

Most so-called strategic thinking stops at level one – the obvious.

Creating and curating content/context communications including perpetually freshened graphic imagery that draws attention by providing valuable knowledge and insight as well as appealing to only those visitors for whom the community can deliver on its brand.

Maintaining and providing databases that update GPS data as well as making certain that all stakeholder businesses and organizations have “claimed their online real estate.”  Monitoring search engine optimization for the destination and all stakeholders.

Mining and harvesting data and analytics, including primary research, to inform the leverage of private development capital, calculating location specific economic impact and providing and interpreting destination-specific metrics for all stakeholders.

Analyzing, shaping and articulating the visitor experience as well as advising stakeholders on how it can be improved.  Deeply aggregating, trafficking and providing event data to optimize exposure and limit dislocation as well as cannibalization of underwriting and volunteers.

There are others but no more advertising.  Sales will be more like data mining, performed by data analysis rather than glad-handing.  All media attention will be earned.  Official community websites will be comprehensive and capable of being harvested by intermediaries.

Staffs will be larger because these marketing foci of the future are more labor intensive and require quick reactions.  Skills sets that will be prized are analytics, design and backbone.

In my experience only one DMO in a thousand has made even a token shift to a few of these areas that will be the foci of community marketing going forwards.

If you hear a consultant (or DMO exec for that matter) claim his or her clients already do these things, grab your wallet and run.  They are full of, well you know.

Those DMOs that are not trapped in Jurassic Marketing by poor and often regressive or lethargic leadership are usually slowed by “fax thinking.”

By this I mean the tendency to always try to keep “plates spinning” long after they have become obsolete. 

Or in the words of Brian Solis, “stuffing promise into familiarity.”

Unwrapping Generalizable Transformation

Several things came to mind yesterday as I read a column written by a friend of mine who manages the news room for our local newspaper looking back on the 10 years since he returned to Durham, North Carolina in that capacity.

First was how fast ten years goes by and second, that we rarely get a chance to catch up since I ducked below the radar into retirement five years ago.

He noted several brick and mortar projects that he believes have transformed Durham during that span, but what caught my eye at the end of the column was his impression that these projects have changed how we see ourselves.

His impression from ten years ago was that Durham residents conveyed, as he put it, a much more “Eeyore-like, woe-is-us mantra.”

I don’t question that was his impression.  News executives I know tend in general to not only be overly influenced by anecdotal comments from individuals but what they get seems to be overwhelmingly negative.

I took a look back to see what Durham resident opinions were of their community to see if his impressions were generalizable.  They weren’t.  Back then, Durham residents were proud or very proud of Durham by a ratio of 5 to 1.

Even back then, as it had been a decade earlier, that was a higher community pride ratio than any other major city in North Carolina and based on a subsequent study of other cities nationwide, very positive.

Of course, 15.6% of residents were not proud of Durham back then, much lower than other communities and a proportion in Durham that is about average over the last two decades.

So why did my friend think Durham residents were woe-is-us?

One reason is because about two out of three people he encountered on the street or in meetings or emails were not from Durham.  They just commuted to work or or ran a business here, some of whom, misunderstanding they were the ones with issues, would publically lecture Durham.

A far greater percentage of these non-resident workers and business owners/managers were negative about Durham or condescending at best, and their numbers greatly amplified the relatively modest number of Durham residents who had issues.

In fact, until the late 1990s, far more of these non-residents were negative than positive about Durham.  That’s when a decade grassroots effort to reverse that ratio reached a tipping point to the positive and polls showed that Durham residents could sense it.

That’s when they began to believe Durham’s image among nearby populations who had been historically negative was improving, long before any of the brick and mortar projects given attribution in my friend’s column.

So what he heard anecdotally ten years ago obviously made an impression but scientifically, it was definitely not generalizable to Durham residents overall.

While Durham residents who are not proud of the community in any degree has dwindled by 10 percentage points in the past ten years, my journalist friend probably still hears disproportionately from those who are negative.

While the trend of commuters who work here and non-residents owning businesses becoming more positive about Durham has continued to increase since that tipping point more 15 years ago, there are still enough who are negative to amplify discontented locals who are.

My suspicion is that after ten years, my friend is also just getting better at weighting or filtering what he hears.

But he also has a point in his column that the brick and mortar projects have played a role in what he sees as a transformation at least of the area we call downtown.

Experts in the diffusion of opinions through populations would argue that reversing that image issue among residents in neighboring communities including commuters to Durham greatly contributed to making these brick and mortar projects possible, e.g. financing.

New presses don’t make journalism better, better journalism makes journalism better and that has a lot to do with perception, information and opinion, not new coats of paint.

The same is true with bricks and mortar.  It plays a role but it perpetually cycles as all “physical” transformations do.

Anyone concerned about sustainable transformation needs to be very worried that “based on the way people talk,” those who expect a negative experience in Durham has reached a 17-year high, as has the percentage who’s personal experiences here have been negative.

Transformation requires a lot more than brick and mortar.

Ironic First Step to Reclaiming Durham’s Story

It took a few months to figure it out. But 25 years ago as we jumpstarted Durham, North Carolina’s first community branding and marketing arm, one of our first challenges had little to do with Durham.

Back then Raleigh, a community south and east of the airport co-owned with Durham, was desperately over-reaching including expropriation of the assets and identities of other communities.

It was obnoxious but as with most place-related desperation it was fueled by insecurity, an observation made to me as we departed a meeting by the scion of a family that had owned the newspaper there for nearly 100 years.

It became clear to me that one of our challenges, if we were ever going to reclaim Durham’s story and give its brand some much needed oxygen and sunlight, it would be doing something that had nothing to do with marketing Durham.

Ironically, if Durham was ever going to get its due, we had to make the case to Raleigh that it could stand on its own.

As a friend who had worked for the New York Times told me when I accepted the challenge of my fourth destination marketing start-up, “one of those places may just as well be Tulsa and the other Kuala Lumpur.”

Her point was that while they each co-anchor a polycentric “family of communities,” they have very distinct cultures, and as I suspected at the time of her comment, distinct brands, primarily obfuscated only by misuse of the name of the jointly-owned airport located midway between.

Part of my challenge in those early news interviews was to first persuade Raleigh-based media that there was a “there” there in Raleigh while setting the record straight about Durham.

It is hard to believe now but in meetings with counterparts there at the time, I repeatedly had to make Raleigh’s case to Raleigh promoters, officials and residents.

In marketing, this is called lowering barriers.

The work of any holistic community marketing organization is 1/3rd promotion and 2/3rds lowering or eliminating barriers.  All too often ignored, the latter is the “heavy lifting” of successful place marketing.

No amount of promotional energy alone is enough to overcome barriers.

Eventually, new Raleigh allies emerged who understood that if Raleigh learned to stand on its own, not only would it produce better results for each community, but the vast poly-centric region encompassing Raleigh and Durham, now two distinct metropolitan designations, would be better served.

Marketing Durham presented many other challenges but research quickly confirmed that it had one of the strongest identities and senses of place anywhere in the nation, an asset no amount of marketing can create.

Among residents, the sense of community pride and passion here was off the charts.  Far too many communities settle for residents being “pleased” if they measure resident awareness at all, but this is the weakest sign of a connection with place.

As a whole, we didn’t have to worry about Durham residents being able to deliver on our marketing promise.

We also didn’t have to dig down very far to uncover three of Durham’s most enduring values and personality traits as a community, elements that may not be unique, but clearly distinctive in the way they were manifest here.

A little more than a decade later, a two year process facilitated by place brand recovery expert Bill Baker drilled down much further into every part of Durham, which helped us excavate and confirm with research a full range of overarching community traits.

But grasping that Durham’s intrinsic traits included being “genuine, authentic and textured” (now elusive aspirations for many brands) that gave us enough to anchor those first marketing efforts at the dawn of the 1990s (one of the first brand marks shown in this blog.)

Unfortunately for Raleigh, it has never dug down to understand its true brand.  Like so many communities that get the “cart in front of the horse,” the focus there even now is on a logo, a superficial and disposable ingredient that is only valuable when created on deeper, community-wide self-refection.

Impatience with what it takes to reveal a community’s inherent brand is reflected in use of the term “rebrand.”  You don’t rebrand a community because its true brand is intrinsic.  You might “rebadge” it from time to time with a new logo or tagline but that isn’t branding, just a quick change of clothes.

I hope Raleigh does uncover its true brand personality one day.  It may not live up to hype or official expectations or titillate the local media there but it would be far more enduring and effective all around, a beacon for community self-preservation as well as appeal.

Recovering a community’s truly intrinsic brand or personality is a diagnostic process.  Not every trait will be viewed as positive but when accurately distilled, will resonate to “stickers” and “boomers who became “stickers” alike.

If Raleigh is honest with itself it may find that being “over-reaching” has some deeper roots there.  The introspection that comes from a true place brand excavation helps a community rediscover and become comfortable in its own skin.

Raleigh is a great place and worthy of knowing why.

Devolving To Local Government by Delegation, By Neglect

Many people, rather than insist that local governments do the jobs for which they were created and are best suited, seem to harken instead back to the late 1700s.

Back then, rather than handling general upkeep, local governments would issue ordinances obliging each person in the city to clean or repair that portion of the street abutting their house or shop.

Researchers call this period “government by delegation” or “government committed to a policy of externalizing the costs of action.”

That all changed after the American Revolution but it seems that local administrators in communities such as Durham, North Carolina where I live are trying to return to the era of “government by delegation” by neglecting community upkeep while pushing it off on volunteers.

In 1800, near the end of George Washington’s two terms as the first president of the United States, there were still only “thirty-three towns with a population of 2,500 or more, and only six of these urban areas had populations of 10,000.  Only 5% of Americans lived in cities.”

“By 1820, the number with over 2,500 had increased to sixty-one, but only five had populations over 25,000 and 7% of Americans lived in cities, while a third of England did with a comparative population.

Within that span, New York City had also exchanged its Royal Charter to transform as a municipality under the authority granted by the state legislature.  It had also set up a public work force to clean its streets and wharves.

Rather than relying on the inconsistent efforts of residents by eternalizing those responsibilities, NYC had “become an institution financed primarily by public taxation to handle public concerns,” beginning with community upkeep.

By 1805, it had done the same with public health.

In short, following the Revolution, cities and towns moved from externalizing “shoulds” upon residents to implementing scalable, consistent solutions in the public interest.

Today, there are 89,004 local governments in the U.S. including 3,031 counties (down since 2007) and 19,522 municipalities (up since 2007) and 12,884 school districts (down since 2007.)  The majority are special-purpose districts such as fire, water etc.

Local government concern for overall community upkeep upon which these institutions were originally anchored more than two hundred years ago, may have peaked following a spike of renewed emphasis during the Progressive Era, which also gave us city manager forms of government, planning, beautification and urban forestry efforts etc.

Today, local governments seem more likely to neglect community upkeep or to leave it to elected officials as a one-off add on or hope that residents who cite it as a high or very high priority overall in scientific polls will become fed-up and try to fill the void.

Local governments have devolved back two hundred years into “government by delegation,” forgetting the lessons of their origin and the American Revolution.

Rather than fall back to well-meaning efforts by volunteers to fill this void which, while cathartic, are never adequate or scalable enough, maybe we need another Revolution.

Or maybe we need historical exhibits like one in San Francisco right now entitled Urban Olfactory which recreates the smells of neglect in cities past to remind us of the gaps local governments must fill.

One of the major reasons for this current state of neglect is that local government accounting never connects the dots between sources of revenue and areas of expense.

This is why periodic reports are so inconsistent and incomplete when they report that various public facilities have or have not resulted in a deficit.  They only rarely incorporate tax revenues generated by facilities beyond their doors.

Blinded the news media fails to dig down into the numbers.

Durham local governments are again pinching down efforts at community upkeep this year due to a problem that is self-inflicted.

Ostensibly, the reason is to avoid tax increases even for items of neglect.  This way of thinking resulted in bonds to repave streets recently at many times the cost to taxpayers that periodic tax increases would have meant.

Those of us who have worked to pass bonds over the years, did so based on computations of the miniscule increases they would mean to our taxes.  But this is where the problems plaguing local governments today begin.

Instead of immediately increasing taxes after a popular vote, local administrators and elected officials cross their fingers hoping that economic growth will absorb the costs instead, which it sometimes does.

But instead of levying the increases when voters approval was given and then issuing a refund if and when the revenues aren’t needed, local officials walk themselves into a trap when growth in the economy is not sufficient to hide the costs.

Plagued by looming debt service, they don’t want to explain to tax payers that the cost of bonds weren’t levied after each favorable vote and now need to be levied years later when memories have dimmed.

So instead, they double down the squeeze on things they think we won’t notice such as community upkeep.

Only we do notice.  And left no explanation other than ineptitude, we are left mumbling to ourselves that local officials just don’t get it or they lack political will or they fail to connect the dots between community upkeep and curb appeal to economic development and increased valuation.

Only they do get it.  They are just mired in a trap of their own creation, one that is inscrutable to residents.  Rather than fix this paradigm, they say things like, “if it matters enough, people will get angry and let us know.”

And that is the stuff of revolutions.

Finally Embracing Destinations

I smiled when I learned recently that a new boutique hotel opening where I live will be called Hotel Durham, one of four under development with distinctive ties to the community.

When I first arrived here in 1989 to jump start the community destination marketing organization, one of the first phone calls I received was from the general manager of a new hotel asking in what town he was located.

When Holiday Inn was launched after World War II, hotels set about to be cookie-cutter symbols of consistency even though that made them apart from the distinctiveness of the communities that drew their guests.  That began to change in the early 1980s.

By then many hoteliers had ceased to be innkeepers, instead retreating to the “back of the house” as bean counters.  An IBM typewriter salesman turned investment banker named Bill Kimpton changed all of that.  He understood the basic premise that hotels must be portals to the destination for the 1-in-5 visitors who stay in them.

Today that has become a forceful trend as even chains seek to be distinctive, and connected to not only their community destinations but their neighborhoods as well as to local foods and events.  Many aspire to achieve this even down to their interior design and artwork.

One west coast chain, Red Lion, which traces it roots back to Spokane in the 1930s, where my career in community marketing began in the 1970s, has begun to change web pages for its various properties to reflect the community where each is located.

Since hotel chains began, most have focused only on amenities or confusing locators that would make them generic vs. specific to a destination.  For this reason the web pages for many hotels fail to reveal the “there” there.”

Worse, many try to suggest proximity to features in other communities in hopes of poaching business from hotels actually located in those communities.  In addition to misleading potential guests, it signifies how dated they are.

A news report last week noted that Red Lion executives, finding from research that nearly 3-in-4 guests crave a truly local experience are redesigning websites for its 50 properties “almost as if the local CVB designed them rather than a remotely located hotel company.”

The trend is more than symbolic.  Part of marketing a community for visitor centric economic and cultural development is to persuade, and in the case of Durham that represents thousands of visitor related businesses and organizations and facilities, to embrace the advantages of wrapping themselves in the community’s brand.

The trend has been more than thirty years in the making but it appears that at least some hotels are catching on.

Place Is More Than A Name Tag

During a witty presentation at a dinner recently, the adaptive-reuse developer of Durham’s historic Lucky Strike factory objected to being called a Raleigh developer, kidding that “I don’t know what I have to do to be a Durham developer.”

He lives in Raleigh where his family has strong generational ties.  Although the email address for his Durham employees and ventures  still says Raleigh, he does have a very valid point.

From now on I, for one, will defend his case and hope that I haven’t offended him in any way.

Being called a Raleigh developer probably began not as a pejorative but when someone tried to distinguish him from indigenous developers with whom he has competed for tenants and resources.

But the fact that he has a Durham base, pays Durham taxes and is proud of his Durham identity is Durham enough for me.  Besides, one of his sons with whom I was an early collaborator on the mammoth project has relocated with his family to Durham.

Drawing interest and investment from outside a community is one part of economic development especially on the premise they will hire local residents and use locally based suppliers.

However, the centerpiece of economic development is always to retain and grow the businesses that are already there in a community, particularly those that are indigenous.

But you know a paradigm has shifted when a developer from a rival community considers that label a pejorative, even in jest, and pleads the case as many do, to be given a Durham identity.

Many in my former field of economic development are betrayed by failing to be loyal to the very community they accept money to promote.  I remember some awkward conversations a decade or more ago in Durham.

I had to gingerly connect the dots for two of my peers in Durham back then that when you take a community’s money to promote its development, embracing the home team comes with the territory.

Here that means Duke, NCCU and the Durham Bulls regardless of your personal preferences.

At the very least, you are honor bound not to make life difficult for local teams by being distracted with personal connections elsewhere or trying to do a favor for neighboring colleagues. That is the job of economic developers in those communities.

These two peers dug an even deeper hole by trying to justify their allegiance to the Raleigh newspaper because the Durham paper had been bought by a company based in Kentucky.  The room grew quiet when I pointed out that the Raleigh paper was owned by a California company.

The term “local” refers not only to growing indigenous businesses, but to those who invest in facilities based in Durham and pay local Durham taxes.

When you represent a community, it is important to fully embrace it, not just when it is convenient.  That includes modifying previously-held personal preferences and alumni allegiances.

Too many in my former field of community marketing as well as other types of organizations in development come off as generic hired guns because they always seem more attached to their field of work than to the communities they serve.

They are easily betrayed when what they do seems “plug and play” and allegiance is paid to powerful interests over local stakeholders.  They always seem more focused on where they will land next or the next rung on the ladder than on the job at hand.

Because their focus is blurred, many are also ethically-challenged.

Part of my job before I retired was advising relocating or expanding businesses on how to become “Durhamized.”  I was pretty good at it, but gladly left that responsibility to my even more capable successor many years ago.

As local officials often tell me, I’ve done a very good job of retiring.

Authenticity Means Walking the Four-Way Walk

The irony of a huge message greeting travelers as they approach Downtown Durham, NC has been on my mind since Friday.  Shown in the image in this blog, it was erected by the District level of Rotary International over the objections of a great number of Durham Rotarians.

Even if Rotarians here, including many in leadership positions, hadn’t vociferously objected when the plan for the billboards was first floated, District 7710, an umbrella serving 44 autonomous clubs in the north-east-central piedmont region of North Carolina, should have known better than to use billboards to carry its message, especially in Durham.

In their just-published book entitled Can’t Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results, Bob Garfield and Doug Levy make an observation of which Rotary should take note:

“Now marketers can and must define their brands not by ads…but by their core purpose.”

In his related editorial in USA Today yesterday, Garfield, who is also co-host of NPR’s On The Media and a veteran journalist who covers marketing in such publications as Advertising Age, notes that “the public now evaluates brands more on how they conduct themselves in the world than on the intrinsic qualities of the goods and services themselves.”

The Rotary billboard message’s intent was to stimulate membership interest but to me, and I believe to the younger audiences to which it is trying to appeal, the organization’s use of that medium is not only guaranteed a high turn-off to turn-on ratio but it violates three elements of The Four-Way Test of core values to which Rotarians recommit during weekly meetings:

Is it FAIR to All Concerned?

No!  It is an insult to Durham, which banned outdoor billboards in 1984.  When the courts approved their removal, lobbyists for the outboard billboard industry aided by copious amounts of campaign donations persuaded the NC General Assembly to make that impossible.

So Durham is forced to wait for the remaining 89 out of 200 to fall down over time or be removed when roads are widened.

Will it build GOOD WILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?

No!  Not only is it offensive to Durham residents, it runs in the face of the 8 out of 10 North Carolinians who view billboards as detracting from the appearance of communities.

Billboards are viewed by many as “desecration marketing” and unethical because they not only create blight but because their owners destroy roadside trees, generating air and water pollution.

Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

No!  Only .2 percent of Americans find billboards useful during the course of a year.  Even utilization by small businesses has fallen to less than 3% because thoughtful marketers realize that not only will a billboard message turn off more than 8 consumers to every 1 for which it may appeal but the stigma accrues to the brand (in this case Rotary) and not to the billboard company.

Conservative guru William F. Buckley wrote that “billboards are acts of aggression, against which the public is entitled, as a matter of privacy, to be protected…”

Advertising legend Howard Gossage decried the existence and use of outdoor billboards noting that - “Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner’s permission: your field of vision.”

It is possible that Rotary wasn’t aware of where Fairway, the out-of-state owner of the billboard in question, would place its message.  It should have.  It should also have been wary of the complimentary or reduced cost space the outdoor billboard industry provides to non-profits as a means to resurrect what is left of it image and create the misimpression of disloyalty to community values.

Maybe Rotary felt enabled and Fairway emboldened to disrespect Durham, because the community’s downtown advocacy organization, though taxpayer-funded and fully-aware of local sentiment, has for years been too lazy to change out a depiction of an outdoor billboard as art work on its homepage long after being reminded of Durham values.

When serving as president of the largest and oldest of Durham’s five rotary clubs nearly a decade ago, I learned the hard way when consulting Rotary officials up line on controversial matters, that some were fearful of taking a stand, even when to do so meant being consistent to the organization’s core values.

Rotary wasn’t that way back when 16 Durham business leaders, including one in public office met on November 9, 1915 to organize the first Rotary Club here, just short of six years after the now 1.2 million strong worldwide organization was founded.

Beginning just before 1900, Durham like many places across the nation was caught up in what is now referred to as The Progressive Era.  This was an era of reform that spawned a surge of community pride and improvement initiatives across the nation including a concern for beautification and appearance.

The era spawned many community initiatives such as arts councils, city beautification and planning, community-destination marketing (convention and visitor bureaus,) forestry organizations and concern for urban forests, business advocacy organizations such as chambers of commerce and a push toward professional management for cities and counties.

Durham’s first Rotary Club was caught up almost immediately in a struggle between members focused on embedding ethics and ideals in its members and some who were more interested in projects.

For many clubs today, projects are almost entirely the focus which leaves many members and club leaders vulnerable to making mistakes that are contrary to the organization’s core values.  This includes using outdoor billboards.

However, even those who were project-driven when the Durham club was founded had a keen sense of the importance of improving appearance.  The first project was creation of a city park where the City Center District Bull Plaza is today, complete with a stone gazebo (which still exists today at Bennett Place State Historic Site in Durham.)

This is also the era when war broke out between those bent on blighting public roadsides with billboards for rent and those concerned with scenic rights and preservation.  Between 1900 and 1920, the number of cars nationwide increased by 1000 times and with them a network of roads.

By 1920 one candidate for governor in North Carolina was campaigning for voting rights for women and blacks as well as preserving scenic character as a means to make this a tourism state.

O. Max Gardner lost that election, but he ran again and won in 1928.  He then commissioned a report on the state of roadsides in North Carolina.

The report documents that even at the maximum speed limits of 35-40 miles per hour at that time, approaches to cities such as Charlotte and Asheville were blighted by a billboard every 4 to 5 seconds.  Nearly 350 scared the 30-mile route from the east to Durham alone.

Today we know a lot more about the scientific and economic value of eliminating billboards and preserving roadside views with trees and vegetation but it isn’t just the Rotary group that superimposed that billboard on Durham that is oblivious.

Wrapping itself in the cloak of states’ rights to avoid federal initiatives, the North Carolina General Assembly has ironically declared war on local communities even though that level of government is far more trusted among Americans.

The Republican-controlled legislature is not satisfied with its tragic authorization a few years ago for out-of-state billboard companies to override local ordinances and clear cut billions of dollars worth of roadside trees statewide.

Now the legislature is also trying to deny communities the right to protect neighborhood design standards to preserve sense-of-place.  They are also meddling with Charlotte’s management of its airport and trying to strip away the authority of elected school boards over construction of schools.

Many in this state, beginning at the highest levels and obviously including some Rotarians need to revisit The Four-Way Test.

The Three Perceptual Audiences Some Communities Face

It would seem that the official community-destination marketing arm (DMO) for Durham, North Carolina has it made.  By a margin of 13 to 1, its residents have a positive image of their community.  By more than 18 to 1 they are proud of their community, both of which are many times higher than national benchmarks.

Perceptions among internal stakeholders are pivotal to any attempt to leverage a community’s inherent brand into visitor-centric economic and cultural development because they make or break credibility.  But residents are only one of three perceptual challenges facing DMOs.

The second is with prospective visitors and Durham performs well there as well.  At nearly 80%, Durham has the highest positive image among North Carolinians of any of the major cities, a position it has held since the late 1990s when measurement began.

For instance, compared to nearby Raleigh, North Carolina, the state capital, Durham’s negative image among North Carolinians is 87% lower and its positive image is 27% higher. At home, within its own county, Durham’s negative image among residents is 34% lower than Raleigh’s is among Wake County residents.

Durham also has the highest average image in the state among similar-size or larger communities.  Equally important, at 10.3%, it is within 2 points of having the lowest negative rating statewide and it comes within a point of having of having the highest positive to negative ratio.

Durham also has an incredible 11 to 1 positive to negative ratio nationwide as a potential visitor destination, all of which is to say that Durham is in a good position in the minds of external audiences.

So where does its stand with the third perceptual challenge many DMOs may face?

When someone visits Durham, North Carolina, they are twice as likely to encounter a non-resident who works here as they are a resident of Durham working in the facilities and establishments they frequent or the activities in which they participate.

For instance, nearly as many Wake County residents work in Durham as do Durham residents, and studies show they are two and half times more likely to be negative toward Durham.  This means visitors are several times more likely to encounter someone who is negative about Durham, even though, these people may “walk and talk” like a Durham resident.

Most communities have a much smaller share of non-residents or they dominate centric regions.  Raleigh residents working in Durham are three times the proportion of Durham residents working in Wake County or in just Raleigh proper.

Raleigh residents may have a lower image of their community but studies show they are more centric.  So if a Durham visitor asks a question of a worker, who happens to live in Raleigh, the answer given becomes less about where they work and more about them and where they live.

Even though they have a much higher image of and pride in their community, Durham residents in general are less centric.  Any assessment of this third audience by a DMO must take into account not only workforce patterns such as people who work but do not live in a community but also the tendencies of those non-resident populations.

Keep in mind that Durham is the core city of a four-county metro area which taken together with the much more spread out and larger Raleigh-Cary metro to the east is often referred to as a poly-centric region known as the Research Triangle.

Not only is there no dominant “center” to the region but only 3% of the visitors to any of these communities are likely to take in more than one on the same trip.  The condition known as cognitive distance friction, means that to visitors, a mile during a trip seems more like twenty back home.

Even if non-residents working in a community are not negative about it, their lack of knowledge can be interpreted by visitors as negative.  This is especially true, as mystery shopper observations and analysis reveal, when having little local knowledge of a destination community, they are prone to refer visitors to where they live instead, away from the destination the visitors are are visiting.

The result is not only inconvenience and confusion for the visitor but a tremendous loss of visitor spending to the host community from this visit and possibly return visits as well as a dilution of the destination’s brand and credibility.

Community-destination marketing is about informing and changing perceptions and for most communities it involves much more than simply the perceptions of visitors.

60 Degrees and Daydreaming

Last year, Johnny Pesky, the legendary short stop for the Boston Red Sox known affectionately as “needle-nose,” passed away at age 92 following 60+ years in professional baseball.

I am a lifelong New York Yankees fan and by the time I came of age as a sports fan in 1956 -- about the age my grandsons have now -- Pesky was long-gone from the Red Sox and managing the Durham Bulls.  These were the years before the team was made famous by the 1988 movie which hit the screen less than a year before Durham, North Carolina became my adopted home.

My claim to fame as a Bulls fan is that I was first to suggest suggest the 1965 hit song Wooly Bully by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs as the team’s theme song during games. That in turn inspired the team’s mascot, suggested by a friend and Durham Innkeeper, Jim Vickery.

I also reminded the new ownership when I arrived that Hall-of-Fame second baseman and broadcaster, Joe Morgan, whom I had met in Oakland just before relocating to Durham, began his career here in 1963, when things were still segregated in the southeast.  The team retired his number in 1993.

In the mid-1950s, as I was growing up in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho and coming of age as a sports fan, there were no major league teams in the West, so you had favorite teams back east such as the Dodgers in Brooklyn, the Yankees or Giants in New York or the Red Sox in Boston.

However, you also had favorite teams in the Pacific Coast League (PCL), then almost as famous.  Pesky had cleaned the bullpens for the PCL’s Portland Beavers as a youngster and later broke into pro baseball with the Hollywood Stars, which went on to become the San Diego Padres.

During my recent break, my memories were refreshed while reading  the late David Halberstam’s 2004 book, The Teammates – A Portrait of Friendship.  He tells the story of Pesky, Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr and Dom DiMaggio -- all west coasters -- as two of the friends traveled one last time to visit the failing Williams. Doerr’s wife had had a stroke in Oregon, so he could not accompany them on the trip.

In 1956, with Pesky managing the Durham Bulls, I was out in Idaho and got home from school on October 8th to the family ranch in time to see Don Larson complete pitching a perfect game in the World Series in which the Yankees went on to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers for the fourth time in five years.

By 1958, the Dodgers and Giants had relocated to the west coast and the PCL was bringing pro baseball to the Intermountain West, admitting the Salt Lake City Bees and the Spokane Indians, farm teams then for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the LA Dodgers respectively.

I remained a Yankees fan but I remember as I helped friends stomp out room enough to play in five-foot-drifts of snow, hearing them debate whether their allegiances would move west as well.

I didn’t learn until later that greed was the reason for the Dodgers move.  They were drawing well in Brooklyn but the owner demanded a new stadium and LA obliged.  But MLB owners agreed to the move, only if the NY Giants would also move, something the owners hoped would jumpstart that team in San Francisco.

Pro football came to the west coast much earlier but in my younger years, college teams such as Idaho, Oregon, Montana, BYU and the University of Southern California were more popular.

The National Football League (NFL) Los Angeles Rams (now St. Louis) relocated there in 1946 after winning the NFL championship the year before.  They had played as the Cleveland Rams since 1937.  That’s the year my dad was released from the US Army following the end of WWII and pre-history for me.

As I came of age I liked the Rams, but for some reason I was much more drawn to the former teams of the All-America Football Conference such as the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Colts (until they stole away to Indianapolis in the middle of the night.)  That league also spawned the original Cleveland Browns (until they moved to Baltimore to become the Ravens.)

The NFL absorbed those teams from the defunct AAFC in 1950 before I became conscious of sports, but I’ve never been a fan of the “musical chairs” sports franchise owners play or for that matter the “musical chairs” free agency has brought to player loyalty.

I had no consciousness of the Durham Bulls until I saw the movie, but I hadn’t been in Durham more than an hour after having been recruited to jump-start the community’s first official marketing agency, before it became abundantly clear the identity of the team and the community were inseparable.

Just over a year later Raleigh interests bought the Bulls and were promised funding if the team was moved to Raleigh/Wake County setting of a campaign to undermine Durham efforts to accommodate the team and the new owners.

Fans -- half of whom lived in other communities such as Raleigh -- weighed in, telling researchers they would not be as likely to attend if the team was separated from its Durham context.

All is redeemed today as the Bulls play in the City of Durham’s larger, more contemporary but retro-ballpark. Those same Raleigh-interests have ingratiated themselves in Durham by surrounding the ballpark with real estate developments including the impeccable adaptive-reuse of the Lucky Strike and Old Bull tobacco factories, incentivized by the City and County of Durham.

Durham residents didn’t turn their back on the old Durham Athletic Park which was too small to permit the new Bulls’ ownership from moving to Triple A.  Unfortunately, that was done in part to exercise a Minor League clause to clear a radius from Durham sure to deny a team in Raleigh.

Recently, the historic DAP was lovingly restored using voter-approved bonds and is now home to the NCCU Eagles baseball team.

The late Art Model, who infamously moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, is quoted by authors Michael Leeds and Peter von Allen as saying, “The pride and the presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries.”

Having some background in the creation and measurement of both community pride and community and economic development, I think that is an incredibly absurd and self-serving claim for any business person to make.

I look forward to an era, where like with the Durham Bulls, owners come to gain an appreciation of how important their home communities are to their success, regardless from where they draw fans, rather than just how important the teams are to communities.

Remediation Marketing

Until I got to junior high school, it seemed that teachers would always mispronounce my name. Reyn (pronounced like Wren) came out as Reen, Roon, Rain, Run, Ryne etc.

It was embarrassing to correct them but not nearly as embarrassing as it is to call someone or something familiar by the wrong name which, however, doesn’t appear to phase flight attendants.

I can’t remember where I was actually headed at the time but I do remember feeling very chagrined to learn as I was buckling into my seat that I had mistakenly boarded a plane for Detroit.

Fortunately, it was one of those airports at the time where passengers for several flights fed into one jet-way before dividing off into paths to different airplanes, so I didn’t have far to go to correct my mistake.

That must be one reason flight attendants always announce the destination prior to closing the door to a commercial flight, such as one did yesterday, by announcing Raleigh-Durham International Airport before a flawless non-stop flight back home from Florida to Durham, North Carolina, where I live.

Unfortunately, that was the last time on that flight that the attendant or the pilot accurately identified our destination.  They gave us the flight time instead as “Raleigh,” the weather as “Raleigh,” the gate as “Raleigh” and even wished us a nice visit in “Raleigh” or wherever our destination might be.

They were trying to flatter us as you would by referring to someone by name but there is only one problem.  The plane wasn’t landing in Raleigh and only a small share of the passengers were headed there.  The weather sensor isn’t even located in Raleigh.

I stopped as I deplaned and whispered to one of the attendants a suggestion that would improve that flight in the future, “please don’t refer to this airport or the destinations it serves as “Raleigh” and gave her the reasons why.

Her initial response was “that’s just the way we do it!”  I smiled as I was turning away and I replied, “that’s fine, I still love flying Jetwest” and smiling in return she called out to me “I’ll make that suggestion to the lead attendant, but what should we call it?”

I answered, “RDU or Raleigh-Durham International Airport.”

When I first relocated to Durham during my now-concluded career in community-destination marketing, my job involved reversing any touch point where Durham’s identity or Durham assets were being compromised, including references to the airport which is jointly owned by Durham and Raleigh, but is actually located midway between the two cities in Morrisville, NC.

A core but often overlooked principle of community-destination marketing is that a dollar’s worth of “remediation marketing” is worth a million dollars of promotion.

Truncating the name of the airport to simply “Raleigh” was common back when I arrived in Durham to jump-start Durham community marketing, not only in so-called regional meetings, many held at the airport but in news articles, board meetings at the local Chamber of Commerce, news releases by the State Division of Tourism and even utterances by elected officials.

A man with a business in nearby Chapel Hill, who must have lived in Durham City or County or Raleigh or one of a dozen towns in Wake County or he wouldn’t have been appointed to the RDU Airport Authority, wrote a scathing and very personally defaming letter castigating me for requesting accurate references to the airport.

I shared the letter and my reply with my board members so they could cover my back.  Unbeknownst to me, the letter had been courtesy copied widely and it came to the attention of the late and great Dr. John Hope Franklin at Duke University, with whom I was not yet acquainted.

I had forgotten about the letter when, a few weeks later, I attended a large banquet where Dr. Franklin was to speak.  I was stunned when in his first words after being introduced Dr. Franklin asked me by name to stand while he described my still relatively new role and responsibilities in the community.

Saying nothing else about me, he then launched into a funny story about how he always corrected flight attendants and pilots who try to take him to “Raleigh.”  Then with a quick “thanks” he nodded for me to sit down.

Over the next two decades, I would still get plenty of attitude from some folks in Raleigh whenever I performed this very small part of my job, but far more often people would come up to me and ask, “tell me how to correct flight attendants the way Dr. John Hope Franklin does!”

“Pressure vs. Persuasion”

One of the joys of cross country road trips such as the one Mugsy, my English bulldog, and I completed last month is time for reflection.  It is also a great opportunity each night to catch up on reading.

Overnighting in Missoula, Montana near a visitor center for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation reminded me to read a white paper passed along to me by Ryke Longest, a friend who teaches and directs the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Duke Law School.

The paper, entitled Pressure vs. Persuasion was conceived and co-written by C.B. Pearson, a Senior VP for D.C-based M+R Strategic Services who graduated from the University of Montana in Missoula, which lost by the way on Saturday to North Carolina’s Appalachian State University.

Pearson heads one of the company’s offices nestled in the Northern Rocky Mountains where I grew up and worked before migrating to North Carolina nearly 25 years ago.

But he migrated the opposite direction, growing up in rural Fauquier County, Virginia about five hours up the Jefferson Davis Highway from where I live in Durham and an hour and a half north of Charlottesville in an area bordering the Blue Ridge Mountains along trails crisscrossed during the Civil War by famed Confederate General Stonewall Jackson and near the border with Maryland.

While always known as passionate during my now-concluded nearly-40-year career in community-destination marketing, I always tried to go about my business in a “ready-aim-fire” kind of way and with my decisions and strategy nearly always informed by research and data.

But Pearson’s white paper explains why I am often credited with success and also why I wasn’t very successful at other times, at least in my opinion.  The organizations I led during my career which spanned three different communities were in the “advocacy business” which involved not only promoting but sticking up for the communities I represented.

Especially on behalf of Durham, this meant using a mix of what Pearson calls persuasion tactics and “building power through pressure.”   Presenting factual, awareness-building arguments to overcome and reverse the condescension among residents in neighboring counties that was undermining and repressing Durham was only half the battle. 

The real change occurred when the persuasive information ignited the passion and community pride latent in Durham residents, empowering thousands to not only speak up in newsrooms, around water coolers and in co-owned regional venues such as the airport but then then to persist because these proactive Durham Image Watchers also had the facts on their side.

Pearson and his San Francisco-based co-author Aaron Eske suggest that it is the ratio that matters.  They recommend that for “every effort at persuasion, you build in three to four pressure tactics to compliment it.”

Often some pretty influential people in those surrounding counties would privately try to get me fired, or ridicule me and the organization I led in public meetings or even get some of my friends so worried for my safety that they would try to get me to back off, including a board member or two.

They mistakenly assumed that what cultural and moral psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt and public policy researcher Robert Putnam term “bonding capital” or trust within a group such as a community has to be zero sum with “bridging capital” or the trust between groups in a region, for example.

Like persuasion and pressure, it is both/and, not either/or that works best.  They also failed to see that what economist Adam Smith noted and what many dismiss as parochialism, such as that between communities, is a good thing because as Haidt summarizes, it leads “people to exert themselves to improve.”

These critics failed to comprehend the points that Pearson makes in his white paper which indicate that creating change requires a mix of persuasion and pressure, and one or two didn’t even want me to use persuasion.  I wasn’t always sure where the line was either until we began to see results.

Where I failed though was when internal stakeholders such as local officials were involved.  Because the organization I led was an independent public authority formed by state legislation and inter-local agreement, our policy dictated that it was inappropriate to go beyond informing decisions with facts and to get involved with “lobbying” or in the “push and shove” of politics.

But politics is personal, not logical and pressure always trumps persuasion.

The negative externalities spawned by some of those decisions which dismissed the facts will not be felt for many years and by then it will be much too late to reverse them.  But I can already sense their impact and wish we had somehow found a way to do more without crossing that important line.

Engaging The Soul That Empowers Sense Of Place

It was an honor to finally meet and speak briefly with Marc Gobé!

Ironically, living and working in Durham, North Carolina I learned one of his most important lessons on branding 7 or 8 years before he coined it as a “best practice” and a decade before he was to write the seminal book which was updated and revised as Emotional Branding 2.0 just as I was retiring a couple of years ago.

When I arrived in Durham in 1989 to jumpstart the organization responsible for being the “heart, soul, and energy of the community as a destination” and “defender of it’s image and brand” as well as “guardian of its unique sense of place” – Durham was soon to receive recognition as “the city with a soul.”

While all of my previous decades of experience at community marketing and branding involved engaging the head, as nearly all marketing did until it was revolutionized by Marc, I turned out to be a good match for a community with already unparalleled levels of community pride and passion.

Marc Gobe’s brilliant contribution to branding a few years later was was to point out that a brand or product personality (in my expertise, a community) must engage not only the head but the heart and the soul.

Durham at the time I arrived was and had always been big on heart and soul, but these were masked by both unpretentiousness and double-density press coverage which our market intelligence revealed was fueled by incredible levels of negative word of mouth among residents of nearby communities.

So I was able to skip the much harder job of generating community pride and do what I could do best: give that existing pride and passion voice by empowering residents with facts and information, often in the form of statistics and then working systematically to facing down inaccuracies point by point and day by day.

From day one, a couple of people who should have been helping out were critical instead, criticizing the amount of research it took to empower residents and correct inaccuracies even undermining me by “carrying water” for a few in nearby Raleigh who were threatened by our efforts to calmly address what were affectionately termed “water-cooler” myths.

Ironically, even the few trying to undermine the effort were always among the first to call for data to overcome misinformation that was tripping up consultants, threatening loans, dissuading tenants and home buyers or undermining credit ratings or reappraisals.

I smile when, ironically, one of those naysayers will now and then try to claim credit for the turn-around.

While meetings with consultants and appraisers and loan officers often took much of my time, legions of residents empowered now with information to speak up around the water-cooler, created what Marc terms “social voice” both before and after the term social media and related technology became widely available.

They deserve the credit!

Together, we cleared away the clouds of neighboring negativity that were obscuring Durham’s unparalleled but always unpretentious sense of community pride and passion and replaced it with positive word of mouth that in turn has fueled a resurgence that has made things possible that are far more tangible.

In 2005, using a template that Marc Gobé espoused four years earlier in the 1.0 edition of Emotional Branding and a two-year process brilliantly executed by city brand thought- leader Bill Baker and his team, Durham was able to distill an overarching Durham brand anchored in its soulful and temporal values and personality traits.

Adopted in various forms now by nearly 400 disparate Durham stakeholder organizations and in hundreds of thousands of applications, the overarching Durham brand thrives because it engages head, heart and soul.

Marc is a legend among marketers for many reasons the least of which is not only because he co-founded and built up what was known then as Desgrippes Gobé into one of the top five branding firms globally after coming to the United States as a 24 year old immigrant.

He is even more of a legend now because his understanding and passion are focused on promoting the concept that in order for product brands to have a soul, they must be good stewards of the environment and embrace sustainability as more than a buzz word.

He is also one of a growing number of marketers with the courage to once again speak out against the desecration created by huge outdoor billboards that scar roadsides, clear cut green infrastructure and blight communities.  Here Marc stands on the shoulders of Mad Men giants such as Ogilvy and Gossage.

To inform others and engage their head, heart and soul about the desecration wrought by the outdoor billboard advertising industry, Marc personally financed an incredible documentary that is being screened around the country called This Space Available.

Strengths and Threats to Resident Attachment to Durham

(Reposted from Durham News Service)

For nearly two decades DCVB has used scientific polling to annually track things like community pride and satisfaction among residents. It has provided indisputable confirmation of the passion Durham residents feel about their community.  This is important to destination marketing because residents make emotional connections with visitors, and their engagement is key to delivering a successful Durham experience.

Durham was an early pioneer of this type of assessment as a means to monitor the resident attachment and engagement which is so important to the strength of a community.  In fact, there were no benchmarks to compare to except on the few occasions DCVB would sample opinions about similar communities in North Carolina.

Recently, though, the Knight Foundation and the Gallup Poll conducted a similar series surveys of 26 areas of varying sizes across the nation over a three-year period ending last year.

• Passion and loyalty turn out to be the most important indicators of resident attachment to their communities or connectedness which correlates with economic health.

• Compared to the overall passion benchmark of barely 1 to1 nationwide and in North Carolina, Durham passion among residents for the community is nearly 15 to 1.

• In the measure of loyalty to community, which includes how likely residents are to stay and recommend it to others and the outlook for the future, Durham residents are three times higher than the benchmark. Overall attachment to Durham was more than double the next highest community in the benchmark.

The Knight/Gallup analysis also revealed something that threatens to erode resident attachment to Durham if not remedied. With only one glaring exception, among the dozen or so attributes that drive attachment, Durham was above or at the benchmark.

The three most important drivers for the benchmark were identified as 1) social offerings, which includes nightlife, restaurants, arts and culture, and caring about one another etc. 2) openness to different groups and 3) aesthetics, in that order.

• In the area of social offerings Durham residents ranked the community 2.3 times higher than the benchmark.

• In the area of openness Durham residents also ranked the community 2.3 times higher than the benchmark.

• However, in the area of aesthetics, which by 4 to 1 Durham residents rank a as a high community priority, Durham ranks more than 4 times lower than the benchmark.

While by a ratio of 5 to 1 Durham residents rank the community high for availability of parks, playgrounds and trails, by 3 to 1 they disagree that roadsides and public areas are attractive and litter free. By 2.5 to 1 they disagree that Durham has good signs and way-finding to help people get around. And the longer people live in the community, the more they disagree with Durham’s standing on these last two measures.

Clearly Durham residents believe that if officials want to protect and improve the attachment and connectedness among residents then the element they most need to improve is the overall upkeep and aesthetics of the community.

Improving aesthetics will also help improve other drivers of attachment. Experts conducting regression analysis predict that if officials can engage in activities that improve resident perception of aesthetics from the current 2.45 on a scale of 1 to 5 or to 3.45, it will also improve the perception of education by 25% and the perception of overall basic services by 51%.

A Finishing Touch For The City’s Strategic Plan

I love the City of Durham’s new website for tracking progress under its new strategic plan. There is only one thing missing that would tie together the plan’s five goals:

• Strong and Diverse Economy
• Safe and Secure Community
• Thriving Livable Neighborhoods
• Well-Managed City
• Stewardship of City’s Physical Assets

All that’s missing is an overarching strategy that would interweave each of the goals into a “concentrated force,” the essence of good strategy. Strategy experts such as Al Reis liken an overarching element to a setting on a garden hose nozzle (in Durham it would be attached to a water barrel, of course).

Turn it one way, you have a fine mist that military strategists term “scatteration of forces”, turn it the other way and you have a powerful stream that can blast away dirt and grime.

After reading of the City’s goals closely, including the one named “Well-Managed City,” it seems to me that there is one overarching strategy that can tie each of them into a concentrated force.

It is called different things: aesthetics (one of the top three factors that predict resident attachment to a city,) beautification, appearance etc. I’ll use aesthetics.

By now City officials are sensing from resident comments about the number of newly re-paved road, just how much a different upkeep can make in perception. That’s just a fraction of what they will sense if they will just they tackle overall aesthetics with similar intensity.

Here are just some of the ways aesthetics can tie together each of the City’s goals:

• Strong & Diverse Economy – This one’s easy. There is a correlation between visual blight and economic decline just as there is between scenic conservation and economic growth, both the traditional form deployed by the City and the visitor-centric economic and cultural development it jointly leverages with the County through the self-funded Durham’s community/destination marketing authority.

• Safe & Secure Community – This one’s even easier. Both the well-proven “Broken-Windows theory” of crime reduction and prevention and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) correlate good aesthetics to reduced crime and perceptions of public safety.

• Thriving, Livable Neighborhoods – Okay these are all easy. Prompt elimination of litter and graffiti, clean streets, sidewalks and vacant lots, well kept roadsides and medians are overall “environmental order” to reduce anti-social behavior including racism and stimulate social capital and increase property values.

• Well-Managed City – Of course, good aesthetics will address the first objective through increased reduction of litter through recycling but will also increase property values under financial management and the reaction employees will get from residents will encourage them to try harder and feel more fulfilled in their work, especially the majority whom don’t live in Durham.

• Stewardship of City’s Physical Assets – This is inherently about aesthetics including well maintained parks, landscaping around public facilities, clean streets and air and water pollution control is just good business and inspire private property owners to do the same.

To Durham’s credit, it was one of the first community’s to ban outdoor billboards way back in 1984, a bipartisan effort spearheaded by a Republican Council member from Hope Valley. Our community has done many things to foster and preserve sense of place. But we’ve really dropped the ball when it comes to aesthetics.

While some may think it may be too late to add an overarching strategy to the City’s excellent plan, the County is in a strategic planning process where aesthetics can be both adapted and/or then presented as an overarching strategy to tie both the City and County’s plans together.

Every strategic plan needs a overarching strategy that can synergize multiple goals into a concentrated force.