WAFFLE HOUSE

I stopped by the Waffle House down near Fayetteville Road and NC 54 on Sunday. I was in that area on an errand. I sat at the counter.

It is a joy to watch a team committed to customer service. Every person working that morning shift was energized, welcoming, engaging and spirited.

They were talking politely to one another as they called orders. Pouring coffee for people who were waiting for a table, joking and laughing and enjoying their work without skipping a beat. Everyone there at one time or another made eye contact and without being intrusive, radiated a joy for people and their work.

Food was good too. You can build big buildings, grand plazas and cathedrals but in the end impressions created by bricks and mortar don’t last. Genuine customer service does.

DURHAM'S IMAGE NATIONWIDE

A friend interrupted me recently to say that “her daughter works in New York and Durham has such a horrible image, she may never move back here to live.”

Anecdotal horror stories like that drive a person like me nuts, especially when they don’t understand why that is a horrible way to inform marketing strategies. It led us years ago to ask, exactly how many associates have a negative image of Durham or is it just a virulent few? How did they come by those impressions? How representative are they of the population as a whole?

I’m told that when DCVB initiated periodic national surveys in 1995 to benchmark Durham’s image, it was the first to do so. I don’t know about that. Seems a very obvious approach to me. Why jump around based on what may be a very few opinions when you can easily just ask a generalizable part of the entire nation.

According to the most recent survey done last week by Opinion Research Corporation, Durham has an increasingly strong image nationwide:

• Nationwide, by a margin of 9 to 1, adults have a positive image of Durham overall. Just 3% are negative, which is only one point higher than communities in North Carolina with the best image overall and half that of most others.


• Nearly half of those who are aware of Durham are positive about Durham, including 15% who are very positive.


• Since polling and marketing began, awareness of Durham has been increased by 25%, negatives reduced by 2/3rds and the positive to negative ratio has tripled.


• At a ratio of 16 to 1, Durham’s image nationwide is highest as a place with many cultural, educational and entertainment features, up nearly 8 fold since 1995.


• At 14 to 1, Durham’s image as a place with new business and growth potential is second highest, up almost 5 times.

There is still plenty of work to do, though. Awareness still needs to be created for about 4 out of 10 while insulating them from confusing things like 1) misattribution of Durham assets to other communities like Raleigh, 2) inferences that Durham is a suburb of Raleigh caused by misuse or misunderstanding of the airport name and 3) the undercurrent of negativity fueled by 10-12% of adults living in nearby communities.

Oh, and most of all, Durham faces the same persistent stereotypes of the South (think of the movie Deliverance) that are faced by nearly all communities in this diverse and varied part of the country.

"IT'S NOT BOB EVANS"

A comment from a friend often crosses my mind. His mother had visited him from Indiana in a great neighborhood where he lived for a time in Portland, OR. It was one of those places you see at the bottom corner of a historic building with a long bar on one side and rows of tables down the window sides.

After a wonderful brunch, as he signed the check, his mom leaned back and said “this is good but it isn’t Bob Evans.” I enjoy a breakfast at Bob Evans here in Durham regularly but her comment always reminds me that there are people who travel great distances not to do something unique but to do something they do at home or maybe anywhere for that matter.

The vast majority of travelers however are looking for something unique. Not as Richard Florida writes, “world-class” but something indigenous and almost temporal to the destination community they are visiting. It may be a performing artist they could see anywhere but it is in a uniquely Durham surrounding.

Kind of like the Durham Bulls. Not the only baseball team or MiLB baseball team, not “Bob Evans” but uniquely Durham.

As we get ready to open the spectacular, new Durham Performing Arts Center and join several hundred cities where shows tour after succeeding in the "Big Apple"…we can’t forget how crucial it is to work even harder to sustain other Durham theaters unique to Durham’s “quality of place,” like The Carolina, St. Joseph’s, Man Bites Dog, Baldwin, Common Ground, Page, PSI to name just a handful.

For several years, after DPAC's opening we must remember how much harder it will be for each of them to draw sponsorhips, media attention, audience, volunteers and other resources.

BUCKING "SPACE RACE," DURHAM WINNING WITH A SMALL LINEUP AND GREAT ASSETS

In pursuit of the 11% of overnight travelers attending conventions and meetings, cities have added 40 million square feet of new convention center space; more than 22 million in the last 10 years alone, with another 8 million in the pipeline by the end of the decade.

What many affectionately call a “space race” to keep up with other cities, the massive increase in supply, has created intense competition for a segment growing 2.5% growth annually but falling as a proportion of overall travel. To many, the race is responsible for perpetuating low occupancies and expensive concessions to draw groups.

Groups that measure convention center expansions believe the two decade building explosion may be coming to an end; particularly signaling the end of the mega-centers of 500,000 square feet plus.

Project currently in the pipeline average less than 170,000 square feet. Trade Show Weekly speculates that the trend is moving from major convention centers to hotels with convention space, or to smaller more specialized, centers with emphasis on technology, especially in second and third tier cities like all but one in North Carolina.

Durham already exceeds its fair share of conventions and meetings (15% vs. 11%) following a trend termed “going with a small lineup”, to use a basketball metaphor. And just as in basketball, the small lineup can work because 1) the average convention registration is just less than 1,500 with overall attendance just over 2,000, 2) 23% meet in the Southeast on any given year and 3) 24% use convention centers.

So while communities with mega-facilities battle it out over a smaller slice of the pie, communities like Durham meet or exceed fair share with a small lineup by hosting an average of 5,000 conventions and meetings a year or 400 a month.

It really depends on the community’s goals and aspirations. Durham seeks 1) a balance of leisure and business and 2) to meet or exceed fair market share in each segment; meaning to draw a proportion of travelers in each segment equal to the national average for that type of travel.

But Durham is also making improvements to its boutique convention center with more planned, combined with 8--soon to be 10--major convention hotels. Soon Durham will offer three clusters. Two around core meeting facilities with 500 to 1,000 guest rooms respectively in a 2 to 4 block walking distance. To planners, logistics is more important than raw capacity.

It doesn’t hurt to have great assets to leverage. RTP, Duke, NCCU, and a very strong activist community are assets to Durham in drawing conventions. I’d trade that for any mega convention center in any other city. In my experience, it is service and the inherent cultural identity of a city that wins the day.

BALANCING SPECIAL INTERESTS

I’ve been involved in what is called “destination marketing” nearly my entire adult life with the exception of six college years (two of which were involved in marketing a “campus community.”)

Destination marketing is by definition, “visitor centered marketing of a community for economic and cultural development while balancing the interests of visitors, businesses, other organizations and local government.”

It is the “balancing part” that is both the most challenging and often least appreciated. Of course “tourism” is “used” by many as a rationale but that doesn’t mean they really care or even understand tourism or what it means to market a community as a whole.

And then there are the businesses, organizations and facilities that are both woven into a community’s overall story and then have the opportunity to harvest the yield. I rarely run into a theater, museum, ballpark, historic site, arts group, downtown booster, convention facility, restaurant, shopping center, government official or regional or state interest that feels DCVB fully appreciates them or that we do enough for them or that they get enough of our attention.

It is natural for them to believe they play or should be given a more prominent role…it is also natural for those of us truly involved in weaving and telling the overall community story to worry that the story might be undermined by fragmentation or event cannibalization.

Balancing interests, indeed.