My Radio Streaming State of Mind!

I haven’t used an alarm clock or a clock radio in many years but I still couldn’t come to dispose of one the other day.  I was thinking I might still need it if I wake up during the night and because it is an atomic variety, it is a cool clock.  But at my age, it isn’t bright enough to read.

According to a new study by Arbitron and Edison Research, a third of Americans over the age of 12 now use their cell phone to wake up compared to 12% who use a clock radio and 22% who still use a dedicated alarm clock.

Surprisingly,  a full third use some other means, probably meaning they rely on someone else to wake them up. I doubt they are all disabling “helicopter” parents.

In fact, I hardly listen to over-the-air radio anymore except for the local NPR station in snippets when I’m shaving or making coffee in the morning or occasionally in the car.  I find it more efficient to read NPR news shows via a smartphone app.  Reading is much faster and more flexible than listening.  It is also easier that way to forward something of interest.

I may not renew my subscription to satellite radio which has been useful on several cross-country road trips.  Being among the 28% who now have a Bluetooth in-car connection, I discovered a few years ago that it is much easier to stream the news via my smartphone through my car radio and much more enjoyable to listen to music that way via Pandora.

Pandora is measured as part of what is called online radio. In use by more than 80 million Americans since its launch in 2005, Pandora has an incredible 69% awareness level according to this new study.

If you are among the 3 in 10 Americans who are unaware, Pandora permits you to set up personal radio formats using a particular artist or song and then fine tune it by pressing a thumbs down to eliminate a song or a thumbs up to encourage more of that same type in the future.

More than 27% have listened to Pandora in last month and a fifth listened to it within the last week.  More than 45% are already aware of iHeart, a Pandora wanna-be but  driven more as a means to access over-the-air radio stations through streaming (app downoads of Pandora lead by more than 3 to 1.)

iHeart lumps Durham, where I live, in with what it calls the Raleigh, NC market, so if I’m ever inclined to use it to reach an old-fashioned radio station, I am probably just as inclined to select stations in Austin or other areas with stations that haven’t been homogenized (smile.)

Regardless, I find it easier when listening to old-fashioned stations or specific albums or artists or tracks at home or in the car to stream using Rhapsody as I have since 2004 which peaked my interest the following year in Sonos, a wirless, multi-room home HiFi system with access to countless online music services.

All of this is a huge shift.  In 2010 when I retired, only 6% of cell phone owners had ever listened to online radio via their car stereo.  That is now up to 21%.  As the scope of over-the-air radio becomes more and more the same, Pandora and Rhapsody are also a great way to explore new music.

For instance, when I became aware of a new country-folk group called The Lumineers while watching a Hulu Plus-streamed clip of the Chickeneers on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last week (shown on YouTube here,) it took only seconds to tap into not only The Lumineers but a lot of other artists in that category that were new to me.

Not bad for someone who is now Medicare-eligible!  Of course, to my grandsons, ages 7 and 9, things tethered by a cord or restricted to over-the-air broadcast are historical artifacts.

By the way, the new study notes that in the month prior to the survey percentage of Americans over 12-years-of-age who watched TV shows by streaming or downloading them did so as follows:

21% on a television screen

19% on a desktop or laptop

8% on a tablet

7% on a cell phone

Studies such as this try to put the best face possible on traditional formats for TV and radio by pointing out that 45% of the population have digital video recorders (DVRs) and more people listen to online radio (including Pandora) than watch videos online through services such as YouTube.

Lost in the findings that 84% in a car and 62% at work still rely mostly on AM/FM radio is that these numbers are rapidly shrinking.  A sign that the “hoofbeats” of streaming are rapidly gaining is that 67% of homes now have a WiFi network compared to just 9% in 2011 and one in four already have five or more devices connected.

More than half of Americans over 12 have a smartphone including 17% my age or older and three-quarters of those between ages 18 and 34. More than half download music, and 44% listen to online radio compared to 57% who play games, 83% who browse the Internet and 90% who use this device to take photographs.  One in three Americans already have a tablet.

If this all sounds strange to you, just blink.  While I doubt they will ever become entirely extinct – after all we still use fax machines – the writing is on the wall for over-the-air radio and TV as well as cable.

Not only is this of great concern for those who make their living or fortunes with these technologies but even given just the capital costs involved it must seem as the saying goes, “like changing a jet engine in midair.” But shift they must.

The only thing in question is which replacement business model will be most successful in the future and how fast will it become obsolete as well.

Rough Around The Edges and Proud of It!

It hasn’t been easy for assignment editors charged with planning local television news.  Mostly this is because television news hasn’t been local for nearly 50 years.

Viewership for Durham, NC where I live is measured over an area that is more than 100 miles by 100 miles and more than 100 cities, towns and counties.

It may be great for hauling in advertising revenues, but bad for advertisers and a nightmare for those trying to cover news over such a huge area with any hope of keeping it local and balanced.

Public opinion surveys measuring the image of Durham over the past few decades could often link where it was most negative by overlaying the viewing area of broadcast television stations.

But experts also found that the root cause of negative perceptions about Durham wasn’t so-called local television news as much as it was that others who were negative about Durham often contaminated those covering the news.

Some reporters and even anchors on television often had their judgment clouded and their objectivity contaminated by friends and neighbors centered in Raleigh who held virulently negative opinions about Durham.

Others were influenced when this negativity was then re-circulated around station “water coolers.”

In fact, one of the changes that helped turn Durham’s image around, largely between the years 1993 and 2000, was when news decision-makers at television stations began to pay attention not only  to “corrections” from Durham’s then newly-created community-destination marketing organization but also to the DMO’s data-driven advisories.

They noted that the problem wasn’t news coverage in general but the lack of balance by news type and as well an imbalance of news type between communities which leads to the zoning of troubling news. They also warned about the impact of tone such as condescension.

Some stations also listened to warnings that they needed to guard against news reporters who had been conditioned by negative views about Durham.  Some even began to require that news crews covering a community should also live there.

Ongoing cut backs have made that hard to sustain as you can tell by stories such as one that ran a couple of days ago on WRAL in nearby Raleigh about the kick-off of Durham’s annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, one of many signature events that occur here each year.

The anchors gave a great lead in.  The story begins well enough relating the appropriateness of the festival’s home given Durham’s noted authenticity.

But editors permitted an unrelated but stereotypical piece of stock footage – blue flashing lights - to be gratuitously inserted suggesting a crime scene about 26 seconds into the story with what could be taken as a snarky reference about Durham being known for being “rough around the edges.”

Rick Gall had to cringe.  He’s the long-time, award-winning (including an Emmy) news director at WRAL.  He first came to the Raleigh station in the mid-1990s.

He was running the assignment desk when Durham’s DMO - still using studies – was cautioning news outlets that the issue undermining Durham was not so much whether the news was positive or negative but whether it was balanced with similar coverage in other communities and free of negative “spin.”

Gall helped others at the station and in journalism to understand how trying to cover such a huge geographic area with so few crews could lead to stereotypical coverage, especially at night when the temptation is to give emphasis to crime stories because they the easiest to cover.

He also encouraged reporters such as Erin (Hartness) Medlyn to live in Durham, which she did and still does after leaving the station last fall to work here at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

You can see a bit of Raleigh-centrism at the station coming through as the station’s headline announcing the move notes she is leaving Raleigh for Duke.  Actually she was leaving her position for WRAL to work at Duke in Durham where she also lives.

Errors, oversights or slights such as this and the one leading into Tuesday’s story on Full Frame are much rarer these days but Durham’s DMO is wise to be ever vigilant.  Being guardian of a community’s brand and image is all about content balance and context when it comes to news, not suppressing troubling issues.

Success is more likely when working with people of Rick Gall’s sensitivities, but it is nearly impossible given that viewers are spread over 10,000 square miles.  It is unlikely news crews can truly be locally-based or immune from having their perceptions contaminated.

Hopefully as television is devolves due both to the ineffectiveness of advertising and infinite fragmentation, a new business model can be found that returns truly local stations while still rewarding owners.

And by the way, an integral part of Durham’s brand is being genuine and authentic including, perhaps, remaining a “bit rough around the edges.”  However, we prefer to call it gritty and rarely use police lights to illustrate that.

Luckily, our grittiness has never deterred Durham’s commitment to continuing and never-ending improvement.

Where Explaining Marketing Seems Never-Ending

When it comes to understanding sales and marketing, there are four internal audiences that are a challenge for a community’s marketing arm (DMO.)  First let me comment on the one that is internal-internal.

For nearly a century now, marketing has included sales as one of many blended elements.  Effective sales today is more than just unloading something you have.  It is driven by providing value to the customer even if it turns out not to be something your community offers.

It is easy to spot DMOs that haven’t fully evolved because they are facility-driven rather than focused on exploiting their community’s full share of visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

The internal-internal challenge that even holistic DMOs face is getting those involved in sales activities and those involved in other marketing activities to better understand the needs in direct sales.

In an effective community DMO, sales people understand that others in marketing are sales enablers and need an intimate and real-time understanding of the roles they play in the success of sales in the overall marketing process.

According to a study by Knowledge Tree, across all organizations half of sales teams are dissatisfied with the support they receive from their peers in other areas of marketing.  The disconnect usually revolves around collateral, a marketing term that refers to flyers, fact sheets, presentation materials etc.

Often by nature, those in sales are more literal and those in marketing are more conceptual.  To bridge this gap, the DMO for Durham NC where I live breaks the sales process down into a pipeline that maps the various stages and then shows the role of sales in a diagram of the overall marketing process.

Knowledge Tree’s Peter Mollins suggests in a blog post that marketers map various pieces of sales collateral to each step in the sales process with enough flexibility so that sales people can rapidly access the piece they need during the variability of each particular sales call.

A white paper produced by Knowledge Tree as part of its own “content marketing” breaks down what the company calls a “content lifecycle” for the collateral materials marketers generate to enable their peers involved in sales.

It suggests that those non-sales marketers devise very specific metrics to measure the effectiveness of each piece of collateral to better enable rapid evolution and improvement.  General increases in overall sales results are not enough.

Managing and updating content is a huge challenge for a data-driven community DMO.  But there are three other internal audiences that are also always a challenge for community-destination marketing organizations:

• Local government officials, elected and administrative
• Strategic partners such as downtown organizations and chambers that use the term marketing but practice primarily sales
• Some visitor sector organizations, particularly many hoteliers at the local level who view marketing as just sales

These groups are not alone in the need to better understand marketing.  According to experts such as place-marketing guru Dr. Philip Kotler at Northwestern University, marketing is “terribly misunderstood in business circles and in the public’s mind.”

For many local elected officials, the only element of marketing with which they have frequent direct exposure are “yard signs” during campaigns.  On the flip side, the element of marketing to which they are most subjected as recipients, are those still practicing the nearly extinct form of sales as a mix of arm-twisting, cajoling and financial enticements, such as is done by many lobbyists.

No wonder that so many local officials struggle to understand customer-driven, holistic community marketing.

Likewise, many downtown organizations and chambers of commerce that sometimes contract with local government to court prospects for business relocation or expansion may use the term marketing but essentially practice only sales after these audiences have been primed by overarching community marketing.

Sales is particularly relevant for these groups because their focus is supply-side economic development while community DMOs work economic development from the demand-side.  Communities are most productive where communities understand, respect and exploit both roles.

In savvy communities these organizations work hand in hand with respective DMOs, even cross-populating collateral tools such as they do in Durham, NC where I live with both the Downtown Map & Walking Tour and the Official Visitor & Relocation Guide.

Leveraging respective roles such as this is hindered only when there is a failure to understand roles or when people who think in terms of sales begin to presume they understand overall marketing.

Many during my career in community marketing were fascinated with marketing but mistook it for advertising, another of the many elements blended into marketing.  Not surprisingly, they were often drawn to glitzy ad campaigns because they learned about them from ad sales people with whom they can relate.

DMOs also occasionally run into misunderstanding with some some in the lodging industry, one of six or seven industries that compose the visitor sector economy.  Nearly all marketing for a hotel is done at the chain level and involves primarily branding not destination marketing which is performed by DMOs.

Lodging facilities do not drive demand at the destination level, they harvest it once interest in the destination is generated by overall community marketing.  The best tool for harvesting these potential customers once they are destination aware is often sales, especially for those facilities focused on the 1 in 10 visitors who attend conventions and meetings.

Friction can arise if hoteliers do not appreciate that the role of a DMO is different than a lodging property.

Other visitor-sector entities practice a mix, deploying marketing to reach residents and specific elements to harvest their fair share of visitors.

The challenge for a community DMOs is to find and exploit opportunities to perpetually educate these groups and their stakeholders about marketing in general, and more specifically, the role of community marketing.

However, even under the best conditions, it isn’t unusual from time to time for individuals in one or more of these groups to mount an attack on and/or try to undermine a community’s marketing arm. Usually it is about power or money or both.

Effective community-destination marketing is best when relationships are mutually respectful.  Sometimes that means DMO execs are required to still work with individuals who may at the same time be trying to stab them in the back.

For community-destination marketing organizations, it is all just part of the job.

Authenticity Means Walking the Four-Way Walk

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it FAIR to All Concerned?

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

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

Will it build GOOD WILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?

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

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

Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Consumer Behavior At the Core of Community Marketing

Apparently, a study has surreptitiously been conducted about the safety of using smartphones during airline take-offs and landings without the knowledge of the FAA.

Among other habits, a survey of 6,000 business travelers globally by Four Points by Sheraton inadvertently revealed that 12% of these most frequent of air travelers never turn off their smartphone during a flight.

Even though business travel has continued its long, slow decline, now 22% of travel volume, the 1,000 business air travelers sampled in the U.S.A, where they make up more than four out of every ten passengers should be statistically significant enough to help inform an FAA to drop restrictions on at least smartphones.

But it isn’t just at 30,000 feet that things are so slow to catch-up.

A survey by ExactTarget a few months after I retired in 2010 revealed that over 85% of purchases are made within 15 miles of home or work.  Other surveys show that the vast majority of purchases are made within 7 to 10 miles of home or work.

When people are traveling away from home, the radius shrinks even more dramatically due to a consumer phenomenon called “cognitive (aka subjective) distance friction” where the “impression formed in the mind of the distance between places that are not directly visible” seems like 20 to 1 compared to home.

Studies of the friction of distance or the related distance “decay effect,” a “decrease in interaction between two phenomena, places or people as the distance between them increases,” commenced more than 80 years ago as automobile travel spread across the country.

Notable from that time are studies still relevant to define the minimum distance between shopping centers and malls and the clustering of competitors.

Realizing the billions of advertising dollars at stake, in the 1920s outboard billboard companies, followed in the 1930s by radio stations and in the 1950s by television stations and eventually even some newspapers, declared war on the identities of communities believing consumers could be persuaded to disregard distance.

It clearly didn’t work.

An example is the so-called “common” market area used as a media measure embracing where I live stretches far more than a 100 miles from north to south and nearly as far from west to east making many truly local advertisers feel fleeced.

Yet, studies show that community identities have grown even more dear to residents and in addition to being inundated by 10,000 ads per day, obfuscations such as this may be why more than 80% of television viewers skip ads altogether including nearly 9 out of 10 leading Millennial and Generation X consumers.

Beginning nearly 50 years ago studies revealed that residents on foot begin to resist walking at distances of 6 or 7 minutes or from a quarter to a third of a mile.  Again, resistance for visitors sets in at even shorter distances.

In 2008 researchers with backgrounds in geography, engineering, travel behavior, economics, architecture and environmental design, transportation and urban planning based at the University of Minnesota, the University of Colorado and McGill University plotted rates of “distance decay” on a reverse-J curve for people walking, bicycling, taking transit and driving automobiles.

This ground-breaking analysis included travel for a variety of objectives including work and school, as well as discretionary purposes including shopping, restaurants and recreation where toleration for distances proved even shorter.

As depicted in the chart for single-occupant auto trips show in this blog, (note the distances are given in kilometers and rounded a km is approximately .62 miles) for travel to a restaurant for instance, nearly 40% will travel about a tenth of a mile and only a few percent will travel more than 10 miles.

Distance tolerances for shopping and entertainment are only very slightly less restrictive.

The graph also helps explain why only between 1% and 3% of visitors to either Durham NC, where I live or nearby Raleigh, NC, the next metro over, will combine a trip to both communities on the same trip and usually then only with a local escort.

Impedance is much greater for visitors to a community because cognitive friction dramatically increases when someone is new to a route or when it extends over where names are duplicative (e.g. the ubiquitous reference “five points” in the state where I live,) over hills and dales, on irregular road patterns and/or without geographic points of reference e.g. a mountain.

The study shows that distances don’t increase that much with a passenger in the car.  GPS systems can mitigate some resistance but they also remind the traveler of the overall distance involved and the complexity of the routing which results in selection of a closer objectives.

Coherent, comprehensive, community-wide wayfinding systems executed down to the level of specific facilities have been shown to mitigate some effects of distance fiction or decay within a community.  However, it is not clear they overcome the impedance between communities.

Studies on local search indicate that tolerance for distance between locations is retracting, not expanding.

Local search is rapidly shifting to mobile devices using both apps and increasingly optimized websites.  A recent study by Telemetrics and Nielsen reveals that not only are the vast majority of local searches in an automobile but there is a heightened sense of urgency with more than half expecting to find a location either in walking distance or within a short drive and this is even more true of categories such as restaurants.

Overall, only 23% expect a further driving distance and less than 1 in 4 have no expectation of distance.  Year over year the trends show that location is becoming even more relevant leading some to reference “local searchonomics,” a term aptly coined by a firm named 15 Miles (presumably round-trip.)

Last week, two people in the travel sector emerged from a meeting in the Durham Convention Center and asked a bystander how much it would cost for a taxi ride to Raleigh.  Asked why, the two visitors professed to be “foodies.”

After explaining it would be approximately $100, the bystander added that as for a national reputation for foodies, they were better off remaining in Durham for dinner and gave some suggestions.

I suspect there might be several sources for their confusion.  One might expect they should know better being involved in travel, but ironically many working in that sector are oblivious to consumer behavior, hoping to fool travelers by pretend locations.

Their geographic ignorance may have been fueled by a friend from Raleigh or someone who had traveled there, who was unfamiliar with or negative about Durham as well as insensitive to their pocketbook.

These two visitors may have been misled because Raleigh is the first name listed in the co-owned airport or a flight crew may have truncated the welcome on arrival creating the misimpression the area was somehow centered around that community and they were traveling to a suburb.

Actually, like many the area is polycentric, there is no dominant center.

Or they may have picked up a Raleigh-centric impression from the news media based there or someone working at their hotel in Durham but who lives in Raleigh and lacking knowledge of Durham may have decided to send them to where they live instead.

There are several lessons in this blog for community-destination marketing organizations:

• Focus visitor information on the community you represent.  Breaking down visitor information by district is extremely useful.  Going into general information about other destinations is only confusing.

 

• If the community you represent is in a centric vs. poly-centric area or located in the environs of a larger community, never buy into the “table crumbs” theory or expect that visitors will commute to visit your community.

That Kool-Aid has been sold for decades but it isn’t supported by sound consumer behavior research.  Focus on serving visitors to your community.  Encourage other communities to do the same.

 

• Sit down with airport officials, airlines and media outlets that serve your community and help them understand consumer and travel behavior, especially in polycentric-areas.

 

They may blow you off at first.  Many have a huge stake in perpetuating obfuscation but at least try to sensitize them and explore nomenclature that will be sensitive to businesses in your local business climate and to consumers, especially visitors.

 

• There are many reasons to leverage resources through coop marketing, particularly in projects where communities with various affinities in your state can morph in and out of projects.

Never let another organization or community throw a “greater” label over your community.  Any coop venture should recognize individual community brands and identities.

The use of “greater” is often superimposed for purposes of hegemony but more often it has been a way in the past to rationale over-reaching or poaching back when membership models were in vogue.

Avoid using feasibility consultants who still deploy antiquated “centric” models.  They are responsible for tens of thousands of underperforming community facilities.

 

• Try to reason with the US Postal Service to assign street delivery designations and zip codes so they are consistent with physical locations.  Searches are GPS based so they ignore these mis-identifiers but they are still confusing to visitors.

 

• Optimize your community’s website for mobile devices.  Less than 5% of local businesses, organizations and events have done so and even when they catch up, one of a DMO’s most important marketing assets for residents and visitors is a well-curated, comprehensive, mobile and location friendly aggregation.

Good data on consumer behavior should be at the core of community-destination marketing.  Community marketing is about guarding and promoting community identities.

This isn’t parochial or just about jurisdictions as some with other agendas may try to dismiss. It is all about relating to consumer behavior.

Savvy communities such as Durham, NC now draw up top 70% of patronage for restaurants, shopping and entertainment from visitors – many of them daytrippers –not by dismissing or trying to subvert consumer behavior regarding distances from nearby communities but by emphasizing community identity, brand and allure as a visitor destination.