Jurassic Marketing

I couldn’t help but smile recently by a headline in my email reading “Digital Pushes PR and Marketing Closer.”

Actually, tactical activities such as PR as well as other forms of promotion such as sales and advertising were tucked under the heading of marketing nearly 60 years ago.

But someone a lot younger than I am obviously still hasn’t received the memo.

Social historians, such as Dr. James Stoddard, a marketing professor at Appalachian State University where I will guest lecture on strategy next week for one of his colleagues, gives us insight into how marketing evolved over the last 150 years.

The period from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s, is known as the “production era.”   Then the Great Depression ushered in the “sales era” where promotion became a tool to unload products.

That all changed after WWII, but many marketers, including far too many in my former profession of community destination marketing, are still stuck in the 1930s.

These DMO’s are made obvious by their obsession and that of the communities they represent with mega-facilities, mega events and then paying subsides in order to get visitors to come.

This creates a never-ending cycle guaranteed to hollow out any sense of place in these communities, robbing them of their innate appeal.

Marketing had turned the corner from these techniques by 1960 when Dr. Theodore Levitt published Marketing Myopia in the Harvard Business Review, which was expanded into a book during the first decade of my now concluded career.

That means my former peers have had more than three decades to shift gears.

So why are so many marketers, though much younger, still stuck so far back in the past including those hoping to be enabled by a handful of legislators in North Carolina eager to facilitate long since obsolete forms of “desecration marketing” along roadsides?

Shortly after I landed my final marketing gig for Durham, North Carolina, Dr. Levitt famously wrote in another article entitled Advertising: The Poetry of Becoming:

“People don't take vacations to get away from it all but to escape from modern commercialism.  And the chief culprit is advertising.”

We know now from longitudinal studies that this was five years after the effectiveness of traditional advertising tipped into its long slow decline to where it now has a negative return on investment.

Urban Institute researcher and friend of mine, Ed McMahon put it another way in an article published last month in Virginia Town & City entitled Responsible Tourism:

“To understand mass market tourism, think about mega hotels, theme parks, chain stores and the new generation of enormous (4,000 to 5,000 passenger) cruise ships.

Mass market tourism is about quantity.  Mass market tourism is also about environments that are artificial, homogenized, generic and formulaic.

To understand responsible tourism, think about unspoiled scenery, locally-owned businesses, historic small towns and walkable urban neighborhoods.”

Gallup not only conducts research into workforce engagement but also “customer engagement,” which is a primary objective of marketing.

Across a variety of industries, Gallup finds a “powerful link between customer engagement and key business outcomes.”  Fully engaged customers represent a 23% premium over the average.

On the other hand, actively disengaged customers who work against you represent a 13% discount.

The three areas Gallup finds as key to customer engagement are:

• Company [organization or community] always delivers on what they promise.
• I feel proud to be a customer.
• Company [organization or community] is the perfect one for people like me.

In his new white paper entitled Contextual Marketing and the New Marketing Contract, analyst Brian Solis teases out that “empathy makes engagement personal” and when paired, it is “context that makes things relevant,” regardless of the marketing technology used.

Beginning decades before the Internet, marketing became not just a way to follow customer orientation. according to Stoddard, but the means to guide an organization’s direction.

For a community destination marketing organization that isn’t stuck in the distant past, this means that marketing is a tool not just for promotion but the means to safeguard a community’s distinctiveness.

The road to marketing empathy for a community begins with being comfortable in your own skin and seeking not the masses but only those for whom you strike a chord.

It is this overarching strategy that has enabled Durham, a relative latecomer, to leap frog much more established destinations in North Carolina, most of which are trapped in the pre-WWII sales driven world.

It is a world that exchanges distinctiveness of place and empathy for pure mass and homogenization, trading authenticity for mainstream until there will be no reason to go there or no one left in that dwindling market segment.

Sales obsession is what leads some communities to sacrifice soul for envy, build structures that draw fewer than those they replace, recruit events that displace more tourism than they bring.

In other words, a river of no return.

In the words of Solis, various technologies such as email, social media, digital advertising or creative content are a means to engagement but they can “miss the potency of context and empathy.”

The folks at StrongView define context in a marketing sense as “the unique combination of the consumer’s disposition and situation, coupled with the business’s disposition and situation.”

It is part of the continuing evolution from the product focused marketing of the early 1900s to the customer-centric marketing that emerged after WWII.

In a community marketing sense, it begins by not trying to be something you community isn’t but seeking appeal instead to paraphrase McMahon in urban forests, historical context, locally-owned businesses and organic districts, history and people-scaled settings.

In the words of McMahon, it is focusing economic development on what you have rather than what you don’t have even if in tourism it means “ lower volume, lower impact, but higher yield.”

In other words, context.

The Value of Coming In Third

I didn’t remember that my adopted home of Durham, North Carolina is only one of 150 communities it serves, when SONOCO awarded it a Bronze-tier Sustainability Star Award this month.

Durham is no stranger to accolades, especially in the sheer breadth of areas recognized, but in my former career as a community marketer, I would usually breeze past one like this to immediately dig down into the rating scheme and how the community could improve.

Beyond validation, accolades serve as a vanity metric for some but the true value of any ranking, if scientifically done, is as an extremely useful diagnostic to shed light on areas for improvement.

More later in this blog on why accolades are a double-edged sword when it comes to community marketing.

In this case though, it was apparent that Durham was one of the few—if not the only—community awarded at any of the three tiers and that in addition, Energy Digital has named Durham a “Top 10 Recycling Community in the US.”

Durham was the only city in the Southeast to make the list, falling right after Madison, Wisconsin, which hopefully it will soon emulate at recycling plastic film such as shopping bags.

Making its appearance in the top ten even more remarkable, North Carolina as a whole ranks 41st at recycling.

Durham recycles 1,000 tons of material a month (2 million lbs. – 8 lbs. per capita) so it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking this must be the norm everywhere until you read about some other pretty cool cities that really struggle with recycling.

It is also important for Durham to remember that SONOCO Recycling alone now collects 292,000 tons of material a month or 3.5 million tons a year.  If they aren’t already doing so, SONOCO could help us establish a per capita benchmark for which to strive.

Beyond their diagnostic value, community accolades are a signal of quality.  But care must be taken when using them to leverage awareness through community marketing for visitors including the more than 8-in-10 who secretly shop a community as a visitor first.

The accolades provide reasons to believe in Durham’s deep-rooted values and personality traits but a study published last year shows The Paradox of Publicity.

Community marketing is about helping people make decisions that are best for them, and Durham is not for everyone, no community is, but especially one such as this with a strong sense of place and identity.

The study shows there may be more enduring value in not being first in a ranking or accolade, which according to the researchers, if not used carefully, can lead to adoption by audiences who would not have been attracted otherwise.

This can lead to a backlash and disgruntled individuals.  This is why community marketing arms must do their best to provide a full range of content that will help potential visitors, newcomers and relocating executives find the right fit, even if it isn’t your community.

In other words, don’t be quick to discount missing out on first place.

An example is another recent ranking of metro areas by a series of indices that rate sprawl.  When I first looked at the work of researchers at the University of Utah, I questioned if they had been careful to look at variables such as whether the region is polycentric.

Fortunately, they also provided the measure by county, which in a polycentric area, more accurately reflects how people live and perceive where they live.

At this level, the indices reflected accurately what I know to be the differences between Durham and other counties in North Carolina (pages 33-34.)

Sometimes, using rankings or accolades requires digging more deeply into the metrics before publicizing them as a means to help prospective residents, as well as officials, make decisions.

I was shocked recently to hear two people, one in my former profession, question the value of undergoing an in-depth organizational diagnostic for accreditation or reaccreditation.

Communities have very different personalities unless they have surrendered theirs to emulate others.

But I can’t imagine a community that would tolerate having representatives that aren’t accredited or eager to seek any diagnostic that would ensure they are proficient.

Don’t give me the bunk that you are too busy, or in my mind, you better be busy looking for a new line of work.

A Tribute To Durham & Sense of Place

A few months ago, as preparations were underway for a photo essay on Durham, North Carolina, Bernie Mann, publisher of the acclaimed Our State Magazine, headed down I-85/40 from his offices in Greensboro as he often does to consult with Shelly Green, a 15-year veteran as guardian of Durham’s sense of place.

In parting, he mentioned plans to highlight Durham’s sense of place, but to see it you’ll need to rush to a newsstand for the January 2014 issue.  You can see the photographs and hear the photographers talk about them in a video linked here on the magazine’s website.

While you are at it, check out some other Durham features the Our State digital team has assembled including a fun ride through town on I-85 north to the soundtrack of 1984’s classic anthem “I’ve Got A Line On You” by Spirit courtesy of Freeway Jim.

It puts new light on sense of place at every touch point.  Mann’s digital team also assembled a playlist of contemporary music from artists who call Durham home, featuring among others “Younger Days” by the band Mount Moriah, a favorite of mine during excursions on the Cross Bones through the countryside.

Coverage such as this is cultivated over years of interaction and exchange.  It is forged on a bedrock of trust and authenticity, which is why it is called “earned media” and considered more credible.  But as I’ll note later, both the outcomes and the outputs can also be measured.

Bernie Mann made his name in radio first selling advertising and then owning and operating more than twelve stations.  I met him more than 15 years ago at the start of a friendship when he bought Our State gradually increasing subscriptions by nine times to 200,000 and the size from 48 pages per issue to more than 200 now.

Different, though, than most city and state lifestyle magazines, Mann kept the focus on “place” by maintaining a ratio of 60/40 editorial to advertising, and never letting subject matter be dictated by who advertises as many similar publications do.

But beyond that, Bernie not only loves North Carolina dearly, he has an extraordinary sense about what makes a place distinctive, some of which he may have gleaned from his connection with Green over the span he has built the magazine and she has been responsible for Durham’s sense of place.

He didn’t just seek Green out as one of the top community destination marketing execs in the nation (she just finished two terms presiding over accreditation of community destination marketing organizations worldwide but now serves on the Destination Marketing Association International board.)

Mann values her understanding of holistic marketing, especially what is called “earned media” as contrasted to paid media advertising.  This is the part of marketing that works with outlets to provide background, photos and advice to make coverage as accurate and true to place as possible.

Many community destination marketing organizations are anachronistically trapped in sales as a strategy based on the myth that it is the only marketing element that can be measured with a pipeline.  They dismiss earned media as just news releases and love advertising merely as a means of ego gratification.

Leading edge execs learned decades ago that every element of marketing must be and can be measured, not just for outcomes but also outputs.  As one marketing expert paraphrased Sun-Tzu recently:

“Measuring outcomes, but not outputs, is the slowest path to victory. Measuring outputs, but not outcomes, is the noise before defeat.”

In his blog series entitled “The Measurement Myth,” Mark Weiner, the CEO of Prime Research, also argues that earned media and other elements of marketing can emulate the “sales funnel” if it helps marketers move to a more holistic approach to marketing.

Many linear approaches used in my day such as the “sales funnel” and adaptations for marketing overall as part of explaining the process to generate economic development are still useful when informing stakeholders with limited or outmoded levels of understanding.

But Weiner and others such as Brian Solis, McKinsey & Company (image shown in this blog) and DCVB’s Green also argue that the “funnel” is a limited metaphor because true customer engagement is really best represented by a series of concentric loops.

Mann may have crossed into his 80s but he definitely grasps this cycle of stakeholder development when it comes to not only sources of subject matter but as potential subscribers and advertisers.

He views them not as resources to be exploited but as friends and associates on a two-way street.

5 + 1 Insights For Young Community Marketers

While I am not a consultant and it has been four years since I’ve had any involvement in community destination marketing, I still receive questions from time to time from young people who think they might be interested in a career in visitor-centric cultural and economic development.

Below are a handful of the things I pass along:

Build work experience during college.

It doesn’t matter if it is with a destination marketing organization or even visitor-related.  Find something fast-paced and learn everything you can about data-driven decision making, critical thinking, technology and project management/process.

A recent study of employers shows that they rank internships and working during college as top attributes when evaluating recent college graduates, more than 40% higher than they rank college major or volunteer experience.

They also rank working during college more than 50% higher than they rank extracurricular activities and more than 60% higher than they rank college reputation or grade point average.

Get used to not being in control.

Different than marketing other kinds of services and products, when you are marketing a community, not only do you  have no control of any of the facilities, features or events, you don’t have control of the “manufacturing” process either.

In community destination marketing you spend as much time persuading local officials and visitor-related facilities, features and events to understand marketing as you do marketing to visitors.

The community’s brand (distinct personality) you will be sworn to protect and promote is influenced as much by the process of getting through the maze of highways, airports and means of transit needed to get to you as it is things like how easy it is to get around and the community’s overall appearance.

These are things no amount of quaintness or marketing alone can overcome.

Keep in mind that marketing is not as simple as fishing.

It is about helping people make the decision best for them, not just about proselytizing.  For every marketing action, there is also a downside.  Advertising is like “yelling at people” which if not very carefully used, is enough to turn people off.

For example, use a medium such as outdoor billboards and you turn off 7 people for every 1 who finds them useful.  Even Super Bowl ads, where the ads are touted mostly as entertainment, turn off 5 viewers for every 1 who finds them appealing.

Marketing is finding the sweet spot where the tactics you use have credibility and a high turn on to turn off ratio, such as earned media, sometimes still known as publicity.

Even there, the downside potential must be weighed whenever there is a temptation toward hyperbole to which the reality cannot measure up.

Good marketing is more than “me, me, me.”

A good product without good marketing is like “winking in the dark.”  You know you’re doing it but no one else will.  But marketing is also about understanding limitations.

Even the goal of “economic value-added,” which is at the core of community destination marketing, is subject to trade-offs.  A recent study of 2014 travel trends revealed that 88% of Americans will sacrifice other spending in order to take a trip including:

• 54% will cut nights out and related entertainment
• 48% will cut down on eating out
• 42% will cut down on clothes shopping
• 29% will cut down on buying gifts
• 23% will cut down on home improvements
• 18% will reduce charitable giving

Community destination marketing is a “pull” approach but marketers must recognize the “push” effect of tourism on residents making these reductions to travel elsewhere.

Even within a destination, areas such as arts and culture or sports can easily cannibalize another.  For instance, for more than a decade the proportion of the population attending popular concerts has hovered around 22%, including 5% of travelers.

Of this, 52.6% are attending rock concerts, 31.9% are attending country music concerts and 15.4% are attending R&B or Rap or Hip-Hop concerts.  All of the marketing horsepower in the world can move the needle a percentage point or two, but it will be at the expense of leisure dollars going to festivals and other cultural features.

The development of more facilities and programming has not been shown to change the mix of discretionary spending, only tradeoffs within a category.  The same holds true of spectator sports.

A destination is made up of many different silos, each desperately seeking a bigger share of the pie, but a community marketer must be sensitive to balance and what’s best for overall appeal.

Sometimes, the decision not to visit has nothing to do with competition from other communities.

At its essence, community destination marketing is about lowering barriers to a visit to your community by telling its story and then proving a platform for hotels, restaurants, stores and entertainment events to harvest their share using their own marketing.

But sometimes the barriers are more about what’s going on in people’s lives than it is about which destination to choose.  A recent vacation deprivation study revealed that 10% of Americans find they can never relax on vacation (I was always amazed at the number of people who called in sick after a vacation because they were exhausted.)

More than a third cancel or postpone trips due to something that came up at work, 24% find it a hassle to coordinate family schedules, but 44% either prefer to take cash instead or bank the days (most places no longer permit accrual because it shows as a liability on the books) ostensibly to cash them out later on, e.g. retirement.

If these young folks are still interested, then I get into what may be the biggest litmus test of all, ethical behavior.  By this I don’t mean just transparency, which is shown to have little effect on ethical behavior.  I mean the ability to do what is right in the face of powerful special interests or pressure from the news media.

The ability to treat others (including competitors and potential customers) as you would like them to treat you.

The Preservationist Roots of North Carolina Tourism!

Legend has it that promotion of North Carolina dates to 1937 with the creation of a state advertising division but it was actually launched more than a decade earlier when the General Assembly and Governor Angus McLean restructured the geological and economic survey in 1925 into the Department of Conservation and Development.

The mission of the restructured agency included the “active promotion of the state’s commerce and industry, as well as protection of its resources” something first proposed in 1924 by Governor Cameron Morrison who was definitely not known as being a progressive but he would be compared to a few of the people leading this state’s government today.

It is easy to contrast the genius 87 years ago of fusing economic development with environmental resource protection by comparing it to the balkanization of state government today where a General Assembly is controlled by a maniacal drive to sacrifice thousands of acres of valuable roadside trees to out-of-state outdoor billboard companies at no cost.

Now to prove that their leap backward was intentional, the General Assembly has vowed to further sacrifice not only North Carolina’s unique sense of place but also its geologic stability and water and air quality with fracking.

Yes, this is every bit as backward as it sounds and rapidly earning back a reputation this state has spent decades trying to shed.  The next time you hear anyone pontificate about how “you gotta think big” you should run for your life because their hand is not only on your pocketbook but their hubris is risking the well-being of future generations.

The genius of housing both economic development and environmental protection under one department of state government began to silo first with the formation in 1927 with a division for commerce and industry which was merged with a division of public relations in that same department in 1930 just as Governor O. Max Gardner was promoting the values of trees along roadsides.

Gardner was influenced by a survey that year revealing just how blighted North Carolina had already become by roadside billboards, putting tourism and other forms of economic development in jeopardy.

In 1937 a new division of advertising was funded within the Department of Conservation and Development fueled by a new awareness of the value of the state’s scenic character to economic development, something well understood early in the 1800s but then lost first during the devastation of the Civil War and then the almost complete deforestation during the latter part of that century.

Fortunately, despite its name, this new division created in the midst of the Great Depression was staffed for the next 33 years by Bill Sharpe, a writer, photographer and former journalist with a fondness for fine cigars and a grasp of how much more important and effective publicity can be when compared to any other element of marketing communication but especially advertising.

The division changed names many times over the years from advertising to news bureau to travel information to travel and tourism etc. but its mission has remained the same: to leverage awareness of North Carolina for visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

It wasn’t until a few years after Sharpe’s death in 1970 and after North Carolinians voted overwhelmingly in 1972 to add a conservation amendment to the state constitution “to preserve as a part of the common heritage of this State its forests, wetlands, estuaries, beaches, historical sites, openlands, and places of beauty,” that the responsibilities for economic development and environmental resource protection were separated into different departments in 1973.

Perhaps keeping those dots between economic development and environmental resource protection indelibly connected, especially for anyone involved in tourism, would have prevented the divide and conquer tactics we see today where business and the environment are often pitted against one another as though they are somehow zero sum.

Hopefully we’ll go back to the future before it’s too late!

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.

Stickies Wisdom - Old School vs. New School Marketing

Some good things have been coming out of Wisconsin recently and I’m certainly not talking about union-busting or even Sweet 16 basketball or my good friend Bill Geist, master of the minimalist blog.

I’m referring to the humorous but insightful “stickies” posted by Lindsay, Stone & Briggs on the Madison-based firm’s website.  With permission I’m including two in this blog that illustrate what I call “old school” vs. “new school” marketing (click each to enlarge.)

The two illustrations, one labeled 20th century and the other 21st century, aren’t intended to be comprehensive and focus on advertising, just one component of marketing.

But even those still obsessed with the big, expensive, showy ad campaigns of yore will get the point, I think.

For other stickies go to the top, right of LSB’s website and click to enlarge them.