New Brand Wears Well

I have to admit, I had my doubts during the overarching brand process, but the outcome is really wearing well on me the more I read it and view the signature elements.

First doubt I had was if it was possible at all to come up with something overarching for a community as complex as Durham. Polls show that Durhamites have an extraordinary relationship with their community, and while that is positive, it presents challenges to branding. The closer people feel to a community, the more they want their individual perspective to be the brand.

Second, the process itself was painful and a lot of hard work. It isn’t a direct path between A and B. It involves incredible amounts of networking (nearly 50 different segments of the community and hundreds of people), the working and reworking, listening and relistening and, most of all, informing anecdotal views with more generalizable input.

Third, I know as well as anyone that a logo and especially a logo and tagline are not a brand. I wasn’t drawn immediately to the elements that tested so well. But very rapidly now, as I’ve seen the breadth of application and let the symbols and words roll around in my head, it has grown on me.

Lastly, I now have to have patience while others go through the same process and even more patience with the months and years it will take to embed this brand and measure its effectiveness.

Overall though, this has been an incredibly informative process. Even the questioning and second-guessing of latecomers have been both informative for the next go-round and an opportunity to reach people about a topic in which many would not otherwise engage.

We also owe a great deal of thanks to Total Destination Management for patiently guiding Durham through this process.

Embarrassed

Sometimes people in my profession embarrass me. It seems many aren’t pushing to continually improve. For some, it’s all about who’s asking and you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

Sometimes we sound like a selfish clique, looking out only for our own interests. We don’t listen to the needs of other sectors; we just want them to support tourism, well, just because.

Take the school calendar discussion. It’s clearly important to some destinations but not nearly the majority. Other school issues are equally or more important to many of our stakeholders, and they won’t be served by one-size-fits-all or if we “circle the wagons” around some issues, just because they were raised by other tourism officials.

What would others say if we as tourism officials stuck our nose into the way they conduct their business? I think tourism is far more deeply and broadly embraced in destinations where tourism officials are as concerned about other stakeholder needs as they are about those of special interests.

What if the liquor stores/ABC boards all got together and tried to make all of the churches in North Carolina stop holding services on Sunday mornings? Their argument might be along the lines of, “It’s hurting our business, because people don’t want to stay out late on Saturday nights.” And of course, “If we free up people to stay out late drinking, think of the economic benefit that would result…all of those tax dollars for government (not to mention a tidy profit for the distributors).”

Never mind that some communities and some churches would likely say, “It’s fine if you want to change, but leave us alone…we’re quite happy with our service hours on Sunday morning.” Can you imagine how it would feel to have your church hours legislated by a small group having no idea of the consequences of that to each faith community, on the basis of how important the economic benefit would be?

Part of maturing as a profession is being able to ask very difficult questions of one another and treat issues that impact others in a way that we would like tourism treated.

Why Many Listservs Lose Diversity of Opinion

It is disturbing that many listserv comments are used for attacks or result in “piling on” rather than civil discourse. The initial genius of listservs was that they provided an easy way to share opinions and get feedback. But many people on listservs are now only “listeners.”

My theory is that email is a difficult medium in which to gauge tone and humor, especially among relative strangers. So while listservs promote unbridled expression (sometimes vehement, strident or derisive), they require little transparency or accountability for statements and are easily hijacked.

People can vent frustration, often with little justification or rationale. Hidden agendas are easily fostered. These aspects are more than a bit chilling to public discourse. It's the same reason small groups can dominate public hearings. Often they are dominated only by negative agendas or ulterior motives or at best prone to overstatement and theatrics (thus the popular saying, any 30 people in orange T-shirts can determine outcomes).

So listservs to me serve a purpose, but they aren’t nearly as democratic or as engaging as once thought. Oh, they are often democratic in that anyone can sign up and in relative anonymity say whatever they want, but they don’t often yield true discourse, and that’s disappointing.

Seeing Into the Future Is Frustrating

Applying historical trends to the future works for me. It's always been so easy. The frustrating part is that the world appears much more interested in the anecdotal crisis of the day.

So we slip quietly toward a tipping point for global warming. We slip into another Vietnam, not more than 30 years from when we said never again.

In my world, when I’m not trying to explain that visitors are an important source of economic development, I’m trying to warn people not to take it for granted.

Take tax revenue. We can’t take visitors for granted. Oh we learned that in the aftermath of 9/11. It provided a tragic example of what happens to tax revenue and small businesses when the plug is suddenly pulled on travel.

There is a long-term issue that worries me. It isn’t enough that the competition for visitors is more and more fierce. We could be extremely successful as a destination and still be dead even in the near future, when business travel continues its long, slow decline and we just barely replace those travelers with new leisure travelers.

To me it means we need to be deploying significant increases in promotion and marketing just to ensure that the current base of visitors keeps growing. More is needed because transitioning to new markets is always more expensive than growing existing ones.

But people glaze over when you talk about more than 5 years from now, just as many complain if they have to read 10 to 20 pages to apply findings from a report. We’re becoming more and more anecdotal, more and more spoon-fed by the crisis or topic du jour, and in the meantime, we’re ignoring some very real threats in the future.

Street Delivery Designations

For more than a decade, the United States Postal Service has assigned mailing addresses to homes and businesses that are different than the physical location of that home or business. Yup, it adds a whole new meaning to catch-22. I know it’s been that long because I have an editorial from the National League of Cities decrying the practice.

We’re working to get them corrected in Durham. There are tons of reasons for you to have an address that is the same as your physical location and only one for making them different. Our regional post office is in Greensboro, and they seem much more reasonable, but when it was in Raleigh, I was told during a phone conversation years ago that the postal service assigns your address based on where the post office is located that delivers your mail.

So if a post office in one community needs more work to meet its capacity or the postal service anticipates the need for additional facilities, it just goes over into a nearby community (or not so near in some cases) and assigns mail delivery addresses that coincide with the station where your carrier picks up your mail in the morning but totally different than your physical location.

I can see how that benefits the postal service, but why did they make it our problem? With zip codes, it shouldn’t matter if your physical location is Timbuktu and the carrier picks up your mail in Chapel Hill. The address should still coincide with the physical location.

Okay, I’ll calm down. We are making very slow progress in getting corrections. When I first came to Durham, half of the hotels in the City of Durham had been assigned to receive mail as Morrisville, NC, a small town in another county.

I believe the “cons” to this policy vastly outweigh the singular convenience to the postal service. Here are just a few ways this practice is harmful to people and communities:

• It confuses visitors and newcomers who still predominately use addresses to find physical locations and only logically expect them to be the same.
• It undermines or dilutes a community's brand or persona, causing economic harm.
• It confuses people about where their kids go to school, where to pay taxes and where to vote, where to move, how to avoid commutes etc.
• It even confuses the cable company, which often makes assignments based on the mail delivery designation.
• It confuses the news media and results in inaccurate datelines. It also confuses the PR person supplying news releases.
• It confuses the headquarters for many businesses, which end up advertising locations as a city different than the physical location of the store and often publish directories with stores that are located in one community under the heading of another community, thus negating the entire purpose.
• It confuses companies conducting marketing research or public opinion polling.
• It confuses Internet mapping services and websites.
• It confuses Realtors and brokers, home sellers and home buyers.
• It confuses advertising agencies.
• It confuses delivery drivers.
• It makes people feel stupid.

I won’t go on, but I could… forever. My point is there are many ways for the postal service to be efficient and still synchronize mail delivery addresses with actual physical locations. I’m sure by now the people who came up with this practice have retired… so let's grant amnesty (by the way, this practice was never reviewed at any level of government) and get it corrected across the board.