Lessons From An Era’s Promise Unfulfilled

The rumble of our more than thirty year old inboard when it fires to life in our runabout most weekends is a reminder of my own passing into “vintage” years.

Not only because starting up at all, regardless of how well maintained, should never be taken for granted after all these years, but because the powerful 4-cylinder's technology actually dates to the early 1970s.

Coincidentally, that was when I was first cutting my teeth on what became a lifelong career in community destination marketing.

The early 1970s was an era, such as now, filled with transformational promise in that field.

So during frequent guest lectures for today’s college students in destination marketing I encourage them to look back at what they can learn.

In fact, the lessons I hope they will glean might help them understand why so many destination marketing organizations (DMOs) today still function much as they did in the late 1960s/early 1970s albeit under a thin veneer of “digital window dressing.”

Let me touch very briefly on two huge paradigm shifts that gave so much promise and opportunity to DMO execs as the 1970s opened up.

One involved the emergence of a new technology for marketing intelligence and the other dealt with the near simultaneous rise of a range of nationwide sense of place policies.

In the late 1960s while unwrapping for airlines why some people were resistant to flying, Dr. Stanley Plog developed a data model for understanding, segmenting and then appealing to travelers based on the type of leisure destinations that fit their travel interests.

This had the effect of making accessible the vastly greater tourism potential beyond the 10% or so related to conventions and meetings that had been the limited focus of nearly every destination for the previous seven decades.

At virtually the same time, a range of national sense-of-place policies were rapidly beginning to transform communities.

In the wake of 1960s battles that brought disrepute to urban renewal/destruction to make way for mega-facilities such as convention centers, a slate of new policies greeted the 1970s.

Instead, they were intended to make communities more appealing by fostering historic preservation, waterway restoration, natural area protection, cultural endowment and highway beautification by eliminating sign and billboard blight.

Strategic thinkers christened the 1970s as an era when destination marketing, too, would broaden its approach.  Across the land many DMOs even added “and visitor” to their organizational names in anticipation, as did the professional association in 1974.

So what happened?  Why did most stop with just a change in nomenclature?

Why did so few 1970s era DMO execs grasp or embrace these lucrative shifts even as strategic foresights came to fruition?

Or for that matter, why did so few of those who they mentored in subsequent decades ever seem to move beyond the same 1960s style destination marketing?

Don’t get me wrong. There have been some significant strides in destination marketing since that time and there have always been best practitioners and strategic thought leaders.

Even the vast majority who have remained 1960s retro at their core typically try some new elements when they come along.

What is noteworthy, however, is that many often mistake a strategic change as something tactical, e.g. the Internet, and a tactical change as a strategy, e.g. social media and these elements always remain peripheral to a 1960s era core. 

We know now that as strategists projected in the early 1970s, by the early 1990s leisure travel overall eclipsed business travel (including conventions,) which both tipped into gradual, though turbulent, decline in the late 1980s.

Last month it was announced that even among the 9 or 10% of person-trips taken by Americans via commercial airlines, leisure trips have now eclipsed business/convention trips as the pre-eminent reason for US air travel.

And still, generation after generation among DMO execs remain stuck in the late 1960s throwing up look alike mega-facilities, then paying subsidies to get enough groups to fill them.

All of this while then proclaiming, seeming without any sense of irony as one did recently, that this dwindling segment is somehow “the heart of any major city.”

This sense of denial, too, dates to the 1960s.  When the first feasibility studies were conducted as prerequisites for public mega-facilities in the latter 1950s, they came back negative.

Proponents (not all of whom were DMOs) quickly learned the tactic of shopping for studies until they got what they wanted and then stoked hyperbole as justification.

Thus one I suspect was born the “the heart of any major city.”

But this introspection is not about shaming my generation of DMO execs or as you will read sparing myself.

There are several lessons for today’s DMO aspirants to take away from an examination of the failed hopes of the early 1970s if they are to ever hope to help destinations emerge from this quicksand in the future and go on to fulfill the promises of their own era:

First, it may be helpful to understand that in the field of destination marketing, we’re all shaped to a some extent, by the destinations we each have the honor to serve.

This includes the time period when we serve them and especially the foresight of each boards that governs the DMO during those particular spans.

A few people are quick to credit me with fulfilling the promise of that 1970s era but as I will explain, it is far more complicated than that.

Much of any credit goes not only to the nature of the three destinations I led but the unique time frames and especially the unusually farsighted and fearless boards who governed those DMOs during those spans.

I led the first during the 1970s.  I was a voracious reader and had the benefit of some strategic mentors, but it was all just starting to sink in when I moved on.  Within a few years that DMO was and remains, in essence, a 1960s model.

Together with the board, I definitely took the second destination to a fulfillment of the 1970s era promise over stiff opposition from 1960s stalwarts.  Once I moved on though, and the board rotated, it all but reverted to a 1960s model.

It is probably from my third and final destination that any reputation for fulfilling that 1970s era promise is more deserved, but there were always a handful trying to pull us back to the 1960s.

Long after I’ve retired, the destination perseveres but regression is always a threat I’m sure.

So as far as my own record goes, batting .300 is pretty good if I were hitting fastballs or 3-pointers, I guess, but just so so measured against the promise of we felt inspired to accomplish when I started my DMO career in the 1970s. 

Frankly, had I not been the beneficiary of being in these three places when I was, given my nature, it is doubtful I would have been drawn to make destination marketing a career.

Another take-away from examining why more DMO execs didn’t rise to the promise of that 1970s era is that there is an incredible inertia that traps tourism in general in its 1960s past.

In part, this inertia is fostered by at least four conditions:

1. A “circle the wagons” mentality when it comes to change, reflection on the past or even introspection such as this.
2. A powerful industrial complex of entrenched interest groups, feasibility consultants, developers and old-school elected officials.
3. An impatience with discussing concepts, ideas and anything controversial which stymies strategic thinking.
4. A stubbornness or failure to grasp the importance of improvements to nomenclature, e.g. referring to tourism as an industry instead of a sector (which is a combination of many industries such as lodging, transportation, foodservice, entertainment etc.)

There are many other strategic lessons to be learned by looking back at that earlier 1970s era not the least of which is the importance of seeking out those DMO execs today whose DNA traces back to 1970s era execs that somehow, someway, were able to realize some of its promise.

Destination marketing, at its very essence, is about differentiation and that includes, among others, strategic differentiation, marketing differentiation and destination differentiation.

But it all begins with a broader understanding of the arc of where destination marketing has been, where it could have and should have been as well as where it should go in the future to remain relevant.

Few of us in that 1970s era could piece together a picture of the sweeping changes that were underway like we can by looking back in hindsight.

Even strategic thinkers at the time were not connecting the dots for us and maybe that is one of the lessons for students to take away that will help them pull so many DMOs out of the 1960s quicksand and leapfrog to this era’s transformational promise.

The Unlikely Origin of Tourism’s Sense of Authenticity

Reaching back to a tent restaurant erected there in 1919, Lexington brands itself, at least in part, the “barbecue capital” of North Carolina, a state with considerable heritage in that regard.

But it was a tragic train accident eight years earlier that occurred between that would-be tent site and what is now High Rock Lake that is more symbolic for tourism historically across the nation.

My Tar Heel Roots go back to 1650 but because I am the last of a line of five generations of Idaho ranchers going back to the 1860s and didn’t make my way to North Carolina until 1989, I’m considered “adopted” by those who could be considered far more relative “newbies.”

But it seems that wherever I’ve lived, including my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, I’ve crossed paths with William F. Cody.  It was least expected here in North Carolina as I began what would be the last half of a four decade career in community destination marketing.

When a freight train tragically smashed into one of three trains near Lexington, Cody’s “Buffalo Bill Wild West Show”s (sometimes known by other names) was in the midst of 40 performances throughout North Carolina between 1878 and 1916, including two in Durham where we live.

Over 100 horses were killed in the accident, and the vitality of the show that had also performed hundreds of times throughout the country and throughout Europe would never really recover.

But it is easily arguable that no other person did more to instill a curiosity for transcontinental travel across the United States in both Americans and those overseas.

His attention to detail and authenticity informed expectations. 

Equally significant, Cody redefined and instilled a deep appreciation for history, culture and artifacts among those living in relatively newly settled lands east of the Hundredth Meridian.

He seemed to innately grasp what place branding expert Bill Baker tries to impart wherever he is invited to teach.

The brand of a particular place is, in essence, its innate personality.  It exists at the intersection of what internal audiences and external audiences perceive it to be.

Today, more than ever, it is not something you conjure up or create, it’s simple who and what you genuinely are, something Cody understood was far more appealing than fantasy.

In a moment I will share a story or two about how Cody’s influence has helped shape the negotiation of authenticity over the decades about what it is and isn’t western, a negotiation still underway.

But first, for anyone unfamiliar or in need of a very quick refresher:

Cody was born in Iowa in 1846; the year after my ancestors began fleeing across the southern half of that soon-to-be state toward sanctuary in the Rockies.

Then his family moved to eastern Kansas where he lost his father.

At age 11 he worked as a rider carrying messages between drivers and workers on wagon trains before becoming a bullwhacker, then a trapper, miner and briefly a Pony Express Rider.

He enlisted in the Union Cavalry and after the war worked as a buffalo hunter for the railroad.  Cody then became a Chief of Scouts for the 5th U.S. Cavalry, leading the rescue of Wild Bill Hickok.

Eventually, he earned the Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars.

Cody became a public figure and the subject of dime novels as well as outspoken about the rights of Native Americans.  In addition, he became a performer and show producer.

As a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, Cody was also instrumental in the nation’s first national forest and the national reclamation act.

The best way to get a sense of William F. Cody is to visit his namesake along the Absaroka Mountains in northern Wyoming as they give way to the Bighorn.

Cody, Wyoming is the eastern and to many the most scenic and least touristy gateway to Yellowstone Park.  It is also home to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, which is comprised of four museums including one devoted to Bill Cody’s story as well as a research library.

The little town is also home to the still operating Irma Hotel which Cody co-founded a year after that train wreck back in North Carolina. 

He began by acquiring and then expanding the T E Ranch up the more secluded South Fork from Cody in 1895 and then built a hunting lodge up on the North Fork where the road now leads to Yellowstone since the dam was built.

But Cody first saw the potential of this area in 1870 while leading a scientific expedition up the Bighorn.  It happened to be the same year an expedition was being led to examine the potential of Yellowstone.

Until then, exploration of river valleys along the Rockies such as the Henry’s Fork where my ancestors would settle were dismissive of any settlement potential.  But fresh eyes such as Cody’s changed all of that.

William F. Cody had a sense of authenticity that has inspired 150 years of nomenclature about the old West and is preserved today in details and artifacts such as clothing and dress and speech.

His shows inspired audiences to travel and to know what to expect.  They also helped negotiate what experts call the ongoing interplay and socially-agreed upon construct that we designate as authentic.

Tourism faces much courser fault lines than just authenticity today.  Take for instance, the one that exists between commercial hucksterism and genuine sense of place.

The West does too, and not just recently with standoffs by a few militants in Nevada and Oregon.

In 1939, a movement anchored in the Sheridan Rotary Club began with a threat to secede and break off northern Wyoming including Cody and Yellowstone into the State of Absoroka.

The frustration back then, as it had been during the “range wars” 50 years earlier was more about intrastate politics with the federal policies as a surrogate.

But as it does today, another fault line separated the views of preservationist northwestern and fossil-fuel driven northeastern Wyoming.

I thought of this on a cross country trip through my homeland a few years ago while listening to a story on the radio far more reflective of the West in which I grew up.

A rancher down on the South Fork, near Cody’s T E ranch, was out irrigating his hay fields in June of 2013 when he accidentally came between a Grizzly and her cubs.

Watch this very short video of this remarkable account and listen carefully to Nic Patrick’s remarks at the end.

If you are a regular reader, you may recall that my great-great-great grandfather, Thomas B. Graham, was killed in 1864 by a Grizzly in Cache Valley, Utah under similar circumstances, after having put his rifle down to help my great-great grandfather load some wood.

Like many ranchers, Patrick is a conservationist.  Also like many ranchers, he has another occupation.  For nearly forty years, he and his family have built authentic log homes, often for people who are drawn to live a version of the life Bill Cody depicted.

He understands something that William F. Cody came to understand during his lifetime.

Tourism can help preserve nature and the things it loves.  But unmanaged tourism can also often introduce changes that can kill the very the things it loves.

A lot is written today about gentrification of historic neighborhoods.  If well-managed so that socio-economic diversity is preserved, it isn’t a problem.  If not, the very soul of those neighborhoods and the reasons they became so popular is rapidly hollowed out.

However, gentrification can also occur in areas of the West around public lands.   Studies show that for both kinds of gentrification, tourism popularity can provide warning signals to policy makers that they need to instill protections.

Unfortunately, tourism circles today have far too few Buffalo Bill Cody’s.  Instead of being willing to debate the broader issues society faces, they are prone instead to circle the wagons.

“Foresensing”–The Key to Evergreen

In the days before texting I had friends, who even after email had become common via mobile devices, would always call or leave a voice mail message when they needed something or had a question.

It typically involved a document or some research finding.  So I would fulfill the requests quickly via email to leave a paper trail, but these individuals would invariably call again for clarification.

That is unless they disagreed with the information I had sent or something our organization was doing predicated on the findings, in which case they would write a lengthy email neglecting to include the background and copy a trillion other people, now understood as a cardinal sin.

Boy, I sure miss that drama.  But don’t jump to the conclusion that they had a learning or reading disability.

People who did that may have been much more strategic and savvy than it seems.  They probably accepted something I, too, understood at the time but chose not to further enable:

1. Many people no longer read;  2. Even more prefer to shape decisions and opinions on anecdotes and personalities rather than data and information; and 3. Very few are paying attention to the future or evolving.

In community work, like business and government, the world is awash with dead or dying organizational models which are kept on life support by people either addicted to those behaviors or overly conscious of those still all-too-prevalent conditions.

This is why “best practices” are so easy to spot, not merely for purposes of copying, but because the organizations that exhibit them are purposely wired for what entrepreneurial researcher Dr. Joseph Pistrui calls “nextsensing.”

During my now-concluded career in community destination marketing to generate visitor-centric economic and cultural development in four different parts of the country, I was what some would now characterize as an “evergreen entrepreneur.”

Only, I was on the quasi-public-private side of things. Still, according to some, I exhibited all 7 characteristics of evergreen entrepreneurs to some extent in the five different startups with which I was involved and/or led.

I enjoyed startups because you not only get to build an organization from scratch but you get to evolve each one by quantum leaps each time.  During the last half of my career, I learned to do this every few months with the same organization.

Nextsensing doesn’t come from “group-think” exercises such as brainstorming which, as studies have shown, is a pure waste of time unless accompanied with a very healthy dose of critical thinking.

Unfortunately, most people who facilitate or are drawn to the “kumbaya” school of brainstorming seem averse to thinking at all, let alone critically, because to them, asking questions is criticism.

But this is only one of the reasons that the traditional approach to making strategic plans is often futile, or when successful, are destined to be quickly relegated to a dusty shelf (buried on a rarely seen portion of a computer drive.)

An even more compelling reason these plans are now ineffective is that true strategic insight, strategic foresight or “nextsensing,” must be woven into the DNA of an organization in such a way that it occurs organically in real time.

Writing about this aspect in a classic book entitled, The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business, author and researcher Arie de Geus famously wrote “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be your only sustainable advantage.”

Earlier, in 1988, de Geus termed this as “institutional learning” in an article in Harvard Business Review.  He explained that this type of learning is much more difficult than individual learning.

Organizations that are “evergreen” outperform those that are focused only on near-term returns.  According to studies, de Geus explains that they “institutionalize change” rather than reacting to crisis.

In the past, even evolving organizations could afford to gestate learning anywhere from 12 to 18 months before acting on it.

Today, that evolution must be in real time.

Researchers involved with the Nextsensing Project have identified four skills needed to see the future in real time:

1. Stretch Sensibilities – A mindset and commitment to exploration.
2. Stand for Change – Set new directions and adjust priorities.
3. Create a new Order – Retool the enterprise to set new goals and trigger actions no one else has set or achieved.
4. Lead with “Foresense” – Transform hunch to vision and new skills.

In late 1970s, Bert Lance, a banker and native-Georgian who headed the Office of Budget and Management for then President Jimmy Carter popularized the expression, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” an old Swedish proverb.

No even remotely sustainable organization has that luxury today.

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.

10 Ways Tourism can Earn the Respect it Deserves

At least since at least the 1960s and including my now-concluded four-decade career, many in travel and tourism have repeatedly whined that this sector of the economy doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Some are individual businesses who just want a pat on the back.  Others feel they need special treatment or shouldn’t have to pay their fair share of making places visitor-worthy.

It can be annoying and proposals rarely seem to go much beyond chest thumping.  Later in this essay I’ll take a stab at some more systemic ideas for how the travel and tourism sector could earn more respect.

But primarily, complainants are referring to the fact that most elected officials and administrators don’t grasp that the function of visitor centric economic and cultural development is to drive tax revenue.

Focus in government is typically only about dividing up the pie with the mistaken view that generating it comes only from a political decision to levy taxes.

The validity of the tourism sector’s concern is often visible when elected officials, often pushed by developers and advocates, are all too eager to drain resources shouldered for that purpose away from tourism promotion for their own uses instead.

These folks are better known as TINOs or “tourism in name only” and identifiable by their siren song of “build it and they will come.”

It is true that worldwide the travel and tourism sector now generates nearly 10% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) including 1 in every 11 jobs.  It is projected by economists that this sector alone will generate 3% of the GDP in America this year.

That’s bigger than the automotive sector, to add perspective, or for that matter agriculture, education and mining too.

Even down to the county-level, visitor-centric economic development generates a similar percentage of GDP in places where it is actively promoted, such as Durham, North Carolina where I live.

Instead of incessantly complaining that officials just don’t get it or care, here are 10 simple behaviors professionals in the travel and tourism sector could adopt to earn the respect it deserves:

Deep Six the widespread misuse of the term “industry.”  Tourism has never been an industry.  It is an economic sector composed by as many as seven very different industries that happen to rely in part or in whole on a common consumer, visitors.  Remember: industry is small, sector is many industries together.

Distinguish demand-driven visitor centric economic and cultural development from more traditional forms of supply-based economic development.  Tourism is on the demand side and truly generates value-added to a community.

Adopt an all for one and one for all approach.  Too often tourism tolerates actions and positions that throw one industry under the bus while protecting those that don’t want to pay their fair share.

Grasp that respect isn’t won or demanded, it is earned, not from tooting your own horn or chest thumping but by patiently and continually explaining how the economy and tax generation works and how travel and tourism is a means for community destination and cultural development

Stop killing the things visitors love.  Avoid cookie-cutter architecture that only homogenizes communities and adopt zero tolerance for use of tools such as long-obsolete roadside billboards that create sign blight (aka litter on a stick,) desecrate scenic vistas and mar sense of place.

Embrace design thinking beginning by performing a “Drano” operation on tourism organizations and models that having achieved their purpose have become obsolete given changes in the tourism ecosystem.  These only serve as a drain on resources and engagement.

Respect and encourage preservation of the unique sense of place in each destination beginning with place-based assets, traits and values.  Encourage communities to differentiate rather than become generic.  Protect them from being hollowed out by mainstream events and mega-facilities.

Root out intra-sector hypocrisy.  Remember that the tourism sector flourishes as a public-private sector partnership.  Discourage public subsidies of mega-events and facilities that will not generate a return on investment to the public treasury.  Refrain from win/lose issues such as forcing restriction of local school calendars.

Take a prominent lead in solutions to societal inequities such as business models based on paying less than a livable wage, vestiges of institutional intolerance and bias as well as gentrification that is insensitive or imbalanced.  Earn a reputation for win/win facilitator.

Encourage widespread adoption of best practices.  Demand that destination marketing organizations earn accreditation.  Cross populate best practices across all industries in the sector including special assessments such as Tourism Improvement Districts or prepared food taxes dedicated to self-funding promotion, wayfinding, cultural landscape and destination clean up and beautification.

It is complicated to form one voice over an entire sector of multiple industries but it can be done and one of the first steps should be to develop a reliable metric.

It all begins by acting like a sector not just an industry.  It is possible only when the sector is as concerned with the overall ecosystem (including the pubic sector) as it is with individual bottom lines.

If these 10 areas are not of interest, just stop whining about respect.

Before Adios, A Word About Engagement

Regular readers know that over the course of a year I manage to research and write one of these little essays every 1.4 days.

On average, it takes me four or five hours to research and write each one, which is about the amount of time Americans spend working and commuting each weekday.

It’s what I do in retirement; one of the things I enjoy for fun.

I take some extended breaks each year and one of them, give or take, will be over the next four weeks, as I do about this time each summer.

According to a Harris Poll, 90% of Americans take breaks this time of year, one-in-five over last week’s July 4th holiday.  Nearly a third of us (31%) take a plane and 75% of us use a car to travel.

One of ours will be in the Jeep and the other a cross-country flight.  Both will involve family in various parts of the country as will 46% of trips this summer.

Americans traveling this summer will, on average, travel 660 miles round trip.  Each of our trips will far exceed that.

Even though my career involved marketing destinations to potential visitors and then encouraging them to circulate as much as possible, it took the fun out of travel for me.

I’ve always been more of a homebody-lake-excursion person anyway, but in retirement I am now free to enjoy a trip without it feeling like work.

It is probably higher by now, but a 2012 survey found that 71% of travelers are attempting to make more environmentally-friendly choices when it comes to transportation, lodging and food sources.

While there are still some destinations and visitor features that hypocritically practice desecration marketing (such as using roadside billboards) while claiming be eco-friendly—a  few even featuring exhibitions about the environment—they are more noticeable now as exceptions.

I’ve had my eye on a UK company in particular that offers water management solutions and software to hotels and other customers called Waterscan.

The company has found that a hotel, for example, will typically use about 53 gallons of water per day for each occupied guest room.

That can be reduced 30% by harvesting rainwater which can be treated and fed back into the building for non-potable purposes such as irrigation, vehicle washing and flushing toilets.

The amount of water used can be further reduced another 40% by recycling gray water from showering and bathing.

This involves an ultra-filtration membrane system using three underground tanks.

One collects and treats the gray water and feeds it to a filtration tank while the third is a reservoir from which it is fed back into the hotel, again, for non-potable uses.

I suspect it could also be used to treat storm water.

This is especially efficient for hotels because there is an equilibrium of uses and a cost savings of 70% on water use.

For nearly a decade now, Gallup has studied what makes some customers engaged while others are indifferent or even actively disengaged such as being passive aggressive.

Fully engaged customers, researchers have found, are “emotionally attached and rationally loyal” as contrasted to those who are indifferent or neutral with a take it or leave it allegiance.

Activity disengaged customers are detached emotionally from a product or service and may become virulently antagonistic.

I believe those who actively seek out environmentally-friendly brands are likely to be fully engaged and it makes a big difference to the bottom line.

In visitor-related industries, for instance, Gallup found that fully engaged patrons of casual dining restaurants make 56% more visits per month than actively disengaged customers.

Even for fast food restaurants, it is 28% more visits per month.  In hotels, guests who are fully engaged spend 46% more per year than actively disengaged guests.

While many many brands hope to change consumer perceptions by “embarking on big traditional advertising and marketing campaigns,” even social media, according to Gallup has a great deal of influence on only 5% of purchasing decisions and no influence at all on 62%.

But it is the currency of actively disengaged consumers.   Fully engaged consumers are far more attracted by concerns that are aligned with their values.  Fully aligned brands also have double the “share of wallet.”

Communities, businesses and features such as museums, athletic teams and theaters should take note, especially those using desecration marketing such as billboards or those that flippantly cast aside sense of place seeking to be mainstream.

For hotels, as an example, only 28% of guests are fully engaged while 25% are actively disengaged.  The other 47% are indifferent.

Nearly half (45%) of economy hotels as well as 38% of those in midscale properties and 22% of those in upscale properties are actively disengaged.

Even in luxury properties where 38% of guest are fully engaged, 13% are actively disengaged.  Recently, the Ritz Carlton in Charlotte was called out for discrimination after it applied a special service charge during a tournament for a league of historically black colleges.

Some called it a “black tax.”  The hotel apologized and made a charitable contribution to the tournament when challenged.  But there, most likely the service charge was added because studies have shown that black people are notoriously poor tippers, even when holding constant for social economic factors.

While the hotel was probably trying to watch out for its service staff, many of whom were probably also minorities, it may have strayed from its values.

One way or the other, it will now have a lot of actively disengaged consumers over those dates next year.  There is only room for one person at a time to stand on principle.

It is clear that the road to differentiation and alignment begins with knowing who you are as a community, business or organization and then remaining true to that brand.  That doesn’t include paying huge subsidies to attract groups for whom that makes little or no difference.

Unfortunately, only 46% of managers and 37% of non-management employees strongly agree that they know what their organization, business or community stands for and what makes it different, or in other words, a staff that is aligned.

More on this when I get back but read Gallup’s State of the American Consumer.

The Well Worn Path from Penny-Wise to Pound-Foolish

Recent headlines in my local newspaper reminded me of how ironic one of the challenges was during the four-decade career I concluded more than five years ago.

The way the headline writers convey it, our City Council is divided about whether to endorse health insurance from a locally based corporation or send tax dollars off to a company in Connecticut.

Reading more closely, it is nothing more than jawboning to get a better deal, but whatever the reason, it is sending an unfortunate message to local businesses as well as universities here sure to undermine economic development.

Part of my job in visitor-centric economic and cultural development was one where mission accomplished was ever elusive.

it was challenging enough to remind both public and private sector players that a primary outcome for community destination marketing, a demand-side form of economic development, is to fuel the local business climate and the local tax base.

A corollary often lost even on economic developers on the “supply-side” is that it can be optimized only when local businesses and organizations strategically give preference to using or making purchases from other local businesses.

This has always been economic development 101.

But the reason so many in every sector don’t get it is because of a notion called siloed thinking which structurally permeates even the smallest of organizations.

I’ll use local government as an example but it is applicable to organizations as large as Duke University here, one of the state’s largest employers and even businesses that owe tax credits to their success.

Siloing especially infects the way organizations are structured.

This condition results in revenue streams being severed from how an organization conducts purchasing.

During my career, we trained in how to do economic impact analysis, in part, to help local festivals make a case to local government officials for funding but also to help deflect some in the private sector who always seem bent on “big game hunting” to bring in outside mainstream events instead, diluting sense of place.

But rarely if ever do local government officials or organizations anywhere tie their own procurement to local economic impact.

For example, any decision to ditch a locally based insurer for an out of state competitor should factor in the local property taxes paid by the local corporation, along with induced impact from its locally based payroll.

Also included should be the work-side spending of its commuter payroll, spending with local vendors and of course, the company’s local philanthropy.  Any decision to penny pinch should be informed by an economic impact analysis.

During the near decade I was in Anchorage during the 1980s, both the municipality (merged city and county) and State government would give a percentage preference to local vendors during bids, even if it meant a broker until local capacity could evolve.

During the 1990s, the ImPlan input-output model was made accessible with metrics calibrated for each county in the country.  It is the one we deployed in Durham during my former life, both through consultants and for local stakeholders through trained staff.

Rather than a percentage preference such as Anchorage had long used, it makes it possible to run an economic impact analysis to inform decisions including direct, indirect and induced effects as well as “leakage.”

Still, many organization continue to make “penny-wise and pound-foolish” decisions because siloing prevents them from being strategic when it comes to the local economy.

Unfortunately, it is endemic today across all sector.

It is why I still find myself explaining the importance of “buy local” to economic developers, sense of place to boomer developers and recently the importance of using Tar Heel artists to a state arts official.

Especially ironic is when I have to defend selective and sustainably tree cutting over clear cutting to consulting foresters, because the most accurate economic impact models in use today were first developed for the United States Forest Service.

So how did I get so smart? (smile)

I learned my former craft in the early 1970s from a generation of community destination marketing mentors who reached back before WWII.

I then watched as peers came unmoored from how economic development works, to the point that some even humorously tried to justifying imperial over-reach by arguing that it didn’t matter if the visitor spending they drew occurred in the business climate and tax base they were paid to promote.

Really?

I also saw peers over on the “supply-side” of economic development (recruiting relocating businesses) such as chamber of commerce types forgo the importance of using local vendors and local employees as metrics, to rationalize being able to poach members from other communities.

Siloing makes all of us appear stupid.

In the late 1970s, as the organizations I led as startups grew into adolescence and beyond, I began to study a new discipline of organizational structure designed to overcome the tendency of organizations and teams of individuals to silo.

If they haven’t been thrown out, there will be books I devoured on the topic of organizing like a matrix rather than a hierarchy still on the library shelves of the three DMOs I led over the decades since then until retiring at the end of 2009.

It was a theory put into practice by GE when it developed a new type of plant in Durham to assemble jet engines, just as I arrived here, structured around “teams” rather than the customary assembly line which opened in 1993.

But it was a much more difficult concept to execute in a community destination marketing organization, let alone a city, county or other large employer.  Inertia continued to rule

However, a new book I just read may be a breakthrough.

In Team of Teams, retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell, a former Navy Seal who also teamed up to form CrossLead, made the idea of a matrix much more practical and achievable for any type or size of organization.

They also provide a history of how organizations, on purpose, came to be siloed and examples of organizations who have overcome it only to have a new generation of leaders take them back to be siloed.

Team of Teams reminds us that on May 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy, less than four months after inauguration, announced to Congress that Americans would land on the moon before the end of the decade, our space program was a disaster.

That all turned around and this was successfully achieved less than eight years later on July 20, 1969  because George Mueller reorganized NASA into a matrix.  But during the 1970s and 1980s, NASA re-siloed, resulting in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

Despite being well managed and contributing to community accolades, local governments in Durham are and have been heavily siloed for a long time.

An example other than procurement decisions being detached from from revenue streams is the sad state of urban forests.

The strategic approach to urban canopy in planning is undermined by cuts to code enforcement and isolation from urban foresters in general services where they are purposely made non-strategic.

Each of these functions is estranged from public works where trees are as more of a nuisance.

Thus Durham places little priority on green infrastructure and still has no strategic urban forest assessment or management plan of any kind, let alone one that is community-wide like the ones other leading cities began to create and implement nearly three decades ago.

In the meantime, Durham has been losing a net 18,000 trees a year not counting tens of thousands more lost to wasteful clear cutting.  All of this is estranged from local government sustainability and storm water treatment objective elsewhere.

Frustrated?  Eye-rolling?  Overly sensitive?  You aren’t alone as are many who work in local government including some of the brightest and most dedicated people I know.

Problems similar to this are endemic across the county in every sector of the economy.

But local governments can and should set an example because they are in the best place to do so strategically.  There is no better place to begin than by reading Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For A Complex World.

Four Behaviors That Stifle Strategic Thinking

One thing I don’t miss from my former life is being invited several times a year by other organizations to participate in so-called “strategic planning” sessions.

Never mind that regardless of intent, nearly all of them ended up having nothing to do with strategic thinking, dumbed down instead to developing a tactical to-do list.

Real strategy-making deals with uncertainty and ambiguity and very few people are comfortable with that.  More on that later in this essay but there is another reason these sessions usually end up being a waste of time.

It is because they nearly always employ the outdated 1950s notion of brainstorming, which until discredited in the 1960s was promoted as a means to increase creativity by 50%.

So run as fast as possible from any group today still using this practice.  It has long been shown to suck the life out of creativity instead.

I’m not talking about soliciting ideas, observations and input in group settings which can later be analyzed and filtered for patterns and connections that could be useful strategically.

I’m talking about sessions where groups are asked to distill or narrow down the input as a group.

Whether it be participants, governing boards, teams, executives or even some consultants, there are four types of behaviors that undermine this endeavor according to experts such as Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

“Social loafing” is one which is the predisposition of many people to become bystanders when in a group setting, looking much as if they are watching a tennis match.

Then there is “social anxiety” which refers to those poor souls who, rather than engage in critical thinking, soon begin to defend other people’s ideas from serious scrutiny and evaluation.
They are usually also the folks who cut off debate, “bless their hearts.”

Even if a few people in the group are given to discussion, evaluation and strategic thinking, others engage in what is called “regression to the mean,” meaning they dumb down the results of the meeting to the level of those who don’t or won’t or can’t think critically.

Some of this is due to what is called “production blocking,” terminology researchers use to describe a phenomena related to the size of the group.

It refers to the fact that the number of good ideas generated by a group plateaus when there are more than six or seven participants and plummets as the size of the group increases.

And this is even before what I call the “good ole boy” effect occurs, which is when two or three participants align on an agenda in advance of the brainstorming and spend the session trying to persuade or more often bully the group into getting their way.

I can’t tell you how many times I was invited to these sessions because of my expertise in strategic visitor-centric economic and cultural development only to be forced to listen to someone without a clue pontificate on how something would be great for tourism.

Now the new CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, Chamorro-Premuzic explains the behavior of those who were so eager to lecture me on what was good for tourism in his recent book entitled, Confidence: How Much You Really Need and How to Get It.

My problem was never confidence.  But shaping community consensus taught me how often it is that far too many otherwise reasonable people get hoodwinked, as noted in the book, when lobbied by those high on the narcissism scale, into mistaking confidence for competence.

Dr. Chamorro-Premuzic has also found that virtual or online collaboration is far more productive than in-person group think not only because it tempers these behaviors but because participants become more thoughtful overall.

Most so-called strategic efforts, however, actually digress into tactical plans.  The late Stephen G. Haines, an expert in strategy-making distinguished strategic as the “what” versus the tactical of “how.”

Think “roadmap” versus the “vehicles for the trip.”

To paraphrase Gallup experts in the psychology of workplace strengths, being strategic comes from being able to see patterns in data and events “where others simply see complexity.”

Okay, “piece a cake,” right?

The key word is “patterns.”  People who can quickly see patterns and make connections strategically use that ability to sort through various scenarios and see alternatives which allows them to be more creative and innovative.

The reason so few people are strategically inclined is that it requires being comfortable with uncertainty.  Fear of impatience with uncertainty can make us disregard important cues.
In her classic book Beyond Fear, Dr. Dorothy Rowe, a clinical psychologist, argues that more than death itself, we fear uncertainty.

But the comfort with uncertainty that comes with being strategic is much more than falling back on intuition, at least the kinds that are merely gut instincts or snap judgments, which also give profiling a bad name.

It comes down to what Dr. William Duggan at Columbia describes as Strategic Intuition in his book by that title, “a clear thought,” but “not fast” and even somewhat “slow.”

Think “percolate” when you think of strategic intuition or what Steven Johnson calls a “slow hunch” in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, which by contrast is another reason brainstorming sessions end up being so superficial.

In a now classic white paper for McKinsey & Company, Dr. Hugh Courtney who is now the Dean of International Business and Strategy at Northeastern, broke “uncertainty” down into four levels.

Level 1 is “A clear enough future” based on market research and near term capacity, which in my experience is where most organizations stop when attempting to think strategically, if at all.

Level 2 deals with “alternative futures” often in my experience related to trying to keep up with, emulate or “fast follow” competitors, again pretty straight forward but near term in nature.

Level 3 is when a push is made to deal on a spectrum with “a range of futures” but still pretty predictable.

Level 4 is looking out into “true ambiguity,” still data-derivative but more qualitative and speculative in nature.

Plans should strive to deal with all four levels but most clearly stop at the first.  Insights into level 4 often comes from looking back at history for clues to patterns that will influence the future.

Truly strategic organizations employ all four levels but organically evolve strategies by immediately informing them as new information become available.

It is amazing how rapid, in a relative sense, that even the most long term uncertainties are able to be dialed into focus, only to be replaced by more longer term uncertainties.

Why bother then?  Because research confirms that more strategic organizations are not only more nimble and innovative but they perform at higher levels.


But strategy-making is hard work, even for people who are naturally inclined.

In Just 48 Months

People who skipped over a recent post entitled 7 Truths may not have realized that they pertain to the spectacular shift Americans have made in how they access information while on the road.

Take maps for instance.  By far, the way Americans now access maps is online, and according to a survey, 90% do it on the go via a smartphone where they are useful not only for navigation but to pinpoint travel services such as restaurants, lodging and fueling stations.

According to Michelin, which has produced old fashioned static paper maps and guides for more than 100 years, 39% of Americans still keep one in the car as back up.

Less than 2% apparently continue to use roadside billboards.

Although these days, my back up to GPS is a “large print” AAA map, I still have a 1967 Michelin map of France from my first passenger airplane trip of any kind when I had just turned 19 years old.

That is also the year before Michelin started publishing maps and guides for destinations in the United States.

North Carolina first published a state highway map in 1916 when federal aid became available, and then annually or every other year since 1924.  The 1930 edition even showed motorists how to do hand signals for stopping and turning.

The first one printed in color was the 1936 edition, which included a guide to what were then considered the state’s major attractions (shown in the image below,) one of which was in Durham.

Of course settlements had been mapped here beginning in 1590.

It wasn’t until three years after I arrived in North Carolina to officially jumpstart visitor-centric economic and cultural development for Durham in 1989, that city and regional insets began to be added to the state map.

That was the year the World-Wide Web (WWW) was created to enable onramps to the Internet.  By the time the state map added those city insets, the first online maps were created by the Xerox innovation lab, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center.)

By 1994 when we began the shift to moving all Durham information to that platform, Canada and Scotland had put their entire atlases there, the latter being the first interactive maps.

Our organization was one of the first in the nation to incorporate the responsibility to determine or relay “impedance” data to online map companies.  This is what permitted these maps to recognize one-way streets and navigational turns.

Whenever your GPS misleads you - and 63% of us have had that happen - don’t blame online maps, blame the community and/or state that has neglected to update its data which is even more contaminating to static paper maps.

Even venerable Michelin is going online.

Most Americans first learned about online maps through MapQuest beginning in about 1996 but codes written and adapted by that company go back to its origins in the 1980s.

Then along came Google Maps in 2005 built on that company’s acquisition of the work of two Danish brothers in Sydney.

Apple launched the first iPhone less than 24 months later, although smartphones had been conceptualized in 1971, just before I graduated from BYU, and were offered for sale in 1993, on the heels of that first digital map created by Xerox.

Adoption of smartphones by Americans has been at a blinding rate of speed.  From just 35% four years ago, the fraction of Americans now using a smartphone has reached two-thirds, 75% of all mobile device users.

This means that within just 48 months, the percentage using these devices flip flopped to the percentage not using them.  The aftershocks of this seismic shift are just now becoming apparent.

And its substitution by users as the primary means of navigating to businesses as well as learning about new products has been even faster.

Smartphones are also the primary or only means for nearly 1-in-5 Americans to access the Internet including 13% of those making less than $30,000 per year.

Half of smartphone users have their devices to access help in emergency situations and 17% to report neighborhood problems.

Marketers, as a group, can be extremely slow to shift gears with a few even still using roadside billboards, earning a reputation for desecration marketing.

But laggards notwithstanding, it appears that devices such as these have already becoming the salvation for restoration of scenic character along our roadsides.

The Hallmark for Tomorrow's Leaders

Whenever I guest lecture to students in hospitality, many of whom are training to follow my now concluded career path in visitor centric economic and cultural development I jokingly caution them about two things.

But I am not really joking when I tell them that while they will probably graduate from college in the top 1% of knowledge in that field, they will quickly face two challenges.

The odds that their supervisor is engaged and still learning are slim because workplace surveys show that even among managers, only 35% are what experts call “engaged,” while 51% are just putting in time.

An even more worrisome 14% are actively trying to undermine others.

The second challenge they will face is that within a few months the relevance of their knowledge begins to degrade becoming obsolete within the same amount of time it took them to graduate.

Knowledge today is fleeting or “disposable” in the words of leadership researcher and fellow alumnus Liz Wiseman, although 15 years apart in our tenure at BYU.  A key to being workplace engaged is to be a continuous and never-ending learner.

A book Wiseman published six months ago had given me pause of introspection about my career and what people may have seen in me that caused them to put me in the “pilot’s” seat of my first DMO within 36 months of graduating from college.

The book is entitled Rookie Smarts – Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work.

Wiseman doesn’t discount the value of experience but promotes the evidence that “real vibrancy comes from thinking young…with the acuity and agility of a newcomer...” and generating new learning every day.

With experience comes the ability to see patterns and if given the propensity, to think strategically but Wiseman supports the science that one of the key differences “between masters and novices is their strategic horizon.”

The book isn’t written to inspire rookies, though it will, but to inspire veterans to channel their inner rookie smarts.

I came into my first CEO position for a DMO in my mid-20s and about 80 years after the first DMO in the nation was established.  But it was clear to this rookie then that most DMOs had failed to evolve.

The next thirty years were a golden age of community destination marketing for early adopters with advances in research, polling and analytics as well as the rediscovery of the importance of sense of place and placed based assets.

This was the span of time when travel for conventions went into a long, slow decline, now just 10% of travel overall.  It was also when traditional advertising tipped into decline as a marketing tool, sliding to a negative return on investment.

It was a period when federal government innovations such as the Input-Output model for measuring economic impact, GPS, mobile telephony and the Internet were made available for consumer use and coupled with personal computers including Smart Devices to fuel the sharing economy.

Who wouldn’t think like a rookie with changes such as these making so much knowledge disposable?

However, judging by a metric for those willing to undergo third party diagnosis, I fear that 80% of DMO execs may have either retired in place or have been mothballed in place by their governing boards or community leaders.

But even if the reason these DMOs seem decades behind is due to the latter, organizational researchers at Bocconi University and Singapore Management University find that for subordinates, being candid to power holders pays off.

Graduates seeking a career in community destination marketing won’t have to worry about DMOs becoming obsolete as one or two outside consultants always seem to warn although there are plenty of communities on track to become unmarketable.

Places where DMOs will always be relevant regardless of technological changes are those that focus on:

• Telling a community’s story
• Protecting and fostering sense of place and authenticity
• Providing valuable content rather than advertising
• Safeguarding and defending a community’s image and brand

Those roles are at the very core of community destination marketing.  But communities hell-bent on the following will not need a DMO only an ATM because they:

• Subvert sense of place for mainstream facilities
• Subsidize events to locate or relocate there
• Mistake advertising and catchy taglines for branding
• Worship at the altar of “build it and they will come”

In her book, Wiseman uses the terms rookie and veteran for mindsets that “illustrate patterns of behavior.”   DMOs have always functioned in a VACU world, an acronym for and environment of “Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity” and none more so than today.

But those trapped in the strategies I noted above are as Wiseman puts it “on a slippery slope from trophy to atrophy.”

While DMOs will always be in demand wherever sense of place thrives, it is true that many communities are quickly becoming obsolete as destinations.

For any community wishing to change course before it is too late, read the part of the book when Wiseman worked at Oracle and its founder, Larry Ellison suggested she cut her staff by 77% and rebuild.

Communities need DMOs where “professionals…operate less like Caretakers and more like Backpackers, unencumbered by their current reality and able to explore and agilely investigate beyond immediate boundaries.”

Many books on leadership and workplace success should have been a white paper or even a blog post.

Rookie Smarts, however, is jam packed with relevant and useful information on every page and one that I would add to the bookshelf if I were just a rookie starting out after college.

The Void Desecrating North Carolina

I didn’t realize until I saw one while driving cross country, that Rodeway Inns were still in existence.  One of my summer jobs in 1966 prior to college had been moving the furnishings into a brand new Rodeway Inn.

Actually there are still 150 in existence.  At one located above the Clanton Road interchange to I-77 in Charlotte, North Carolina, the owner just illegally clear-cut hundreds of publicly owned trees, ostensibly to make the aging facility more prominent.

That carnage is about 3 miles south of where we will be staying this weekend to have dinner with several friends over in Dilworth and Myers Park districts where the value of trees is made paramount.

But visibility is not that particular Rodeway’s problem.  It has been rated barely a 1.5 out of five possible stars by former guests.

It is a mistake that leads so many visitor related business to defiantly still advertise on roadside billboards, which in North Carolina, have now been given permission by the legislature to clear cut publicly owned trees with impunity, with no recompense to Tar Heels, and then to sell the wood to cover the cost of cutting them down.

It has enabled a torrent of illegal cutting by businesses across the state including Durham where we live.

Now a bill has been introduced in the State legislature to eliminate the NCDOT Roadside Division (see section 2.4 h at link), further beheading any enforcement to prevent illegal cutting and making the likelihood of reforestation nil.

In doing so, legislators would eliminate the division responsible for scenic byways and the award-winning wildflower program along Interstates.

Visitor-related businesses that defiantly use the billboards and enable desecration of the very North Carolina brand upon which they must rely are now joined in that irony by many in the legislature who seek to do likewise, while giving lip service to attracting economic development.

All of this is taking place as studies show that the percentage of consumers and businesses in America that find billboards useful has fallen to less than two-tenths of one percent while 8-out-of-10 drivers and passengers view them merely as blight.

In other words, even if traditional advertising had not fallen to a negative return on investment overall, the turn-off to turn-on ratio for billboard advertisers is tantamount to throwing money into the wind.

Of course, special interests began to deploy copious amounts of campaign donations fifty years ago to undermine highway beatification legislation in America and today even gatekeepers seem under the influence of Stockholm syndrome.

Recently, the Federal Highway Administration humorously declared that digital billboards that change every few seconds are not considered to be, well, intermittent which would make them unsafe and illegal.

The science used or lack thereof was quickly debunked by an independent peer review but it has been nearly 35 years since that agency was proactive in defense of roadside forests owned by taxpayers, having been throttled by special interest influence with lawmakers.

Durham is considering doing an inventory which, if done according to best practices, will include the city and the county and its entire urban forest canopy, not just publicly owned.

The results will give officials, residents and private property owners sticker shock when the value of this part of the community’s green infrastructure is finally appraised.

North Carolina is back in the “dark ages” when it comes to appraising the value of its roadside forests, deeming the value to be that of use as pulp.

Professionals who appraise the value of trees are about to get a much needed update when the 10th edition of The Value for Plant Appraisal is released.

A recent study documented that nationwide, 4 million trees are lost each years in urban environments.  Durham’s trees are beloved by residents but within the city, overall tree canopy has fallen now to less than 5% above the national average.

Neil Norton, who heads the Georgia Arborist Association, an organization dedicated to increasing the availability of professional arborists to Georgians, recently published a post about why accurately valuing trees is important.

He reminds us that the reason communities such as Durham have tree retention and preservation ordinances is to encourage better design of developments.  Left uninformed about the value of trees, decisions about design are driven by bankers given to cookie cutter designs.

While state officials have been busy sacrificing North Carolina’s curb appeal for not only tourism but the more than 80% of newcomers and relocating executives and business expansion scouts who secretly come as visitors first, cities have been going in the opposite direction.

As noted in The Atlantic’s Citylab last week by Deborah Snoonian Glenn, if you want your city to thrive, look to its trees.  This is not only for health and curb appeal but because they are good for business.

A gap in the otherwise incredible scientific documentation in this regard is the influence of trees on visitor-centric economic development.

Unfortunately, even that may not prevent what that Rodeway owner did in Charlotte.  Only by making the punishment truly match the crime will some businesses think twice.

When they do, rather than blaming the tree canopy for their woes, they may realize how desperately they are needed and turn attention to far more critical metrics for customer satisfaction.

When and Why Facts and Data Backfire

To hear some people talk, you would think that tourism to Durham, North Carolina took off only after the opening of the acclaimed Durham Performing Arts Center.

I’ll correct this misperception, but more importantly use this essay to show why the facts will backfire with many of these people.

Durham draws 9 million visitors a year, 6.26 million for leisure.  About 300,000 attend events at DPAC, a little over two thirds with that as the main purpose of their visit or about 3% of Durham leisure visitation.

During the span DPAC has been open, the overall visitation to Durham has increased by about 44% overall and 40% for leisure travel, or 1.79 million visitors of which visitors to DPAC as their main reason was 13% if no one was diverted visiting elsewhere in Durham anyway.

Significant but hardly a tipping point for visitation.

Many Durham features, events and businesses harvest the same proportion of visitors to overall attendance as DPAC does.  Visitation to a community is highly fragmented when it comes to activity.

If there is a silver bullet that ties all of these fragments together it is promotion of the sense of place in Durham’s DNA.  Without this communities become more like shopping malls of clustered features that can be found in nearly every mall of this type.

People who wake up to the fact a community is visitor worthy only when something new opens may be fooled into that mistaken inference by anecdotally-driven news hyperbole.

But even residents of a community rarely have any idea numerically of their community’s visitor appeal.  That typically requires a DMO savvy enough to perpetually communicate to internal audiences the importance overall of visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

During my long-concluded four-decade career in community destination marketing I found this kind of misperception was far more frequently rooted in segments of the population with lukewarm if not border-line negative perceptions of the potential or sense of a particular place.

But my breakdown of the facts above has been scientifically shown to pucker many up, tightening their grip instead on misperception.

In mid-1978, when I took the reins of the DMO in Anchorage, there was a perception that all tourism activity was related to passengers of cruise ships docking solely at the time in Southeast Alaska when a portion added group excursions overland before or after.

It took me 30 months but by 1981 we had conducted research to shed much more light on visitors to Anchorage.  Not counting visiting friends and relatives, business travelers including convention delegates or the 22% who combined business and pleasure, 7% was related to visitors taking a cruise ship or ferry to Alaska.

This was about 1-in-5 vacation visitors to Anchorage in 1981.  Studying the origins, length of stay and activities of the other 4-in-5 gave us the marketing intelligence to strategically and significantly expand visitation to Anchorage within just a few years without taking anything away from traditional Alaska tourism.

Even more shocking from the 1981 data, 67% of visitation to Anchorage came in the non-summer months, 80% from outside Alaska and more than a fifth during months where there is snow.

Offseason visitation had been 1 visitor for every 10 when I arrived in Anchorage and before I left it would be 1 to 1.

What I didn’t expect though from that 1981 data is that for a few,  it shook their belief-system right to the core.  They took the data revelations as criticism and soon painted a target on my back.

Unforunately, they were not unique that way.

Changing perceptions, let alone saving my hide, was never the goal of the study.

Most in Anchorage were open-minded about visitation and not only delighted with the new information and perspective but relieved that its relatively nascent community marketing agency was using these newly discovered facts to set strategy.

It has been more than three decades since then, and sadly, the vast majority of communities still have no idea how many visitors they have, let alone why they came or what they do while visiting.

This makes these places subject to mistaken conventional wisdom, faulty belief systems and big game hunting that instead of reinforcing whatever part of their unique sense of place remains, gradually hollows it out instead.

Durham, where I finished the last half of my career and still live in obscurity (smile) is an exception, probably 1-in-500, having begun to regularly secure data specific to its visitation twenty five years ago.

Still, I was always caught off guard throughout my career at how many officials, developers and boosters seemed much more comfortable instead with making decisions when it comes to tourism infrastructure on what what’s “new and shiny” or what they hear, or “who was asking,”  spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that way.

It wouldn’t be until a year or so before I retired at the end of 2009 that a series of studies by researchers at the University of Michigan and Georgia State University shed light on how facts backfire with misinformed people, particularly if their belief system is based on motivated reasoning.

In the words of journalist Joe Keohane who penned a review of the studies, “Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation stronger.”

That’s something obviously still more than a bit lost on me if you are a regular reader (smile.)

According to the researchers, this is a natural defense mechanism to avoid the cognitive dissonance of having to admit we’re wrong.  It is also far more comfortable to be close-minded than to endure the ambiguity and uncertainty of being open-minded.

But it is a sure death knell for community sense of place.

It is also, in part, why other studies find that nearly all traditional advertising is now a waste, especially as a means of changing opinions about or the image of product, including communities. 

Advertising, in the traditional sense, merely reinforces the belief systems of consumers who are already positive or negative.  It is incapable in the few seconds the average person pays attention, and lacks the credibility to influence any who are neutral.

The overwhelming reason for a DMO to use facts and far more effective content-based marketing is to help consumers who are unsure but open-mined about a product including the potential of a place to visit or live.

They are, in fact, open to corrections, to being informed, to facts.

Communities that fail to use facts when it comes to evolving their delicate sense of place ecosystems leave themselves open to the “motivated reasoning” of boosters, “boomers” and “big game hunters,” most of whom lack faith in a community’s ability or the necessity of evolving to remain distinctive, futilely seeking imports instead.

They are the reason that being data-driven community destination marketing agency is so hazardous.  “Motivated reasoning” also makes people very mean.

But just remember:  communities that remain worthy of love are worthy of good and fearless defenders.