Infographic - Coffee In NYC Compared to London

Strategic Evolution

Looking back, being among the first of its type to bet on the Internet as a paradigm shift in marketing wasn’t the most emergent strategy giving Durham’s nascent marketing organization an edge.

Before two-thirds of Americans had heard of it and fewer than 14% were using it, the most emergent strategy was seizing on the website as the platform or repository for any and all information where not only staff had access.

From there it was also accessible or pushed out via content marketing to internal stakeholders such Durham residents, organizations and officials, but also to external stakeholders such as potential visitors, sports and meeting event organizers, real estate agents and developers, project feasibility consultants and financiers.

Somehow DCVB stumbled on to the realization way back then that not only was data and information the most sure-fire way to drive decision making, but holding it back as proprietary and then parceling out on demand was suddenly an extremely obsolete business strategy.

Of course, as Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote a few years later in his book entitled, The Road Ahead:

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction."

Today, we rarely overestimate the change that occurs every two years but many still fail to heed the caution at the end of what Gates wrote.

Two years after he penned that caution in 1995, Phillip Evans, now managing director of the Boston Consulting Group and former Harvard professor, co-wrote an award-winning article in Harvard Business Review entitled Strategy and the New Economics of Information.

He signaled a transformation that we now know dropped communications costs much faster than transaction costs, collapsed and fragmented economies of scale and changed the strategic value of data proprietary to curation and sharing.  If you missed it, click here for his TED overview last month.

A related paper was published a few weeks ago by McKinsey & Company entitled Are You Ready for the Resource Revolution.  Written by Stefan Heck and Matt Rogers, it explores what they call the “biggest business opportunity in a century,” dramatically improving the use of resources such as water.

The future, according to Evans, is about cooperation and collaboration as much as competition, something community destination marketing organizations have long practiced and coined as “coopetition.”  It is now the business strategy of the future.

Although specific to Durham metrics, many communities have always borrowed data from the DCVB site just as a few here and there in Durham have attempted to pull the organization back into the past.

Strategy-making, though, can’t be copied, at least not without the vision to drive its execution.  It has been known for many decades that strategy is not about planning or analysis, it is about perpetual and real time synthesis.

It must be embedded in an organization’s culture.

Many communities settle for being “fast followers,” a term coined by Dr. Henry Mintzberg in the same paper and a subsequent book from which I learned the idea of “emergent strategy” nearly three decades ago.

Mintzberg was also an early adopter of data as curation and put links to his papers and books online including a new one entitled, Rebalancing Society – Radical Renewal, Beyond Left, Right, and Center.

It is a rant, but don’t expect to skim it for understanding.  He envisions ideology not as a spectrum with extremes but as a circle including the public sector, the private sector and the plural sector or what he calls “communityship,” and what DeTocqueville, at the dawn of this nation, called a uniquely American innovation.

Each, according to Mintzberg, has a “potentially fatal flaw.”  He notes, “Governments can be crude.  Markets can be crass.  And communities can be closed, at the limit xenophobic…Crudeness, crassness and closed-ness are countered when each sector takes its appropriate place in society with the other two while helping to keep them and their institutions in balance.”

Now re-read this with your organization in mind and balance as strategy-making.  Balance, Curation, Cooperation and Resource Optimization – it is a whole new world.

Sound too “out there?”  So was embracing the Internet in the early 1990s.

By 2-to-1 Young Americans Put Environment First

My mind was on Alaska twenty-five years ago as I accepted the position to help start the community marketing agency for Durham, North Carolina, a position and career from which I retired several years ago.

The oil tanker Exxon Valdez had just run aground in Prince William Sound, a spectacular area I visited often during my near decade living in the Great Land.  It spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil, a disaster that spread over an 11,000 square mile area.

Even before the accident, by nearly 4-to-1, Americans back then ranked the environment over economic development, including a majority of Republicans.

An article in High Country News reminds us that scientists estimated it would take 15 years for the Sound to recover.  They were wrong.  It make take more than 30 years.  The damage to the livelihoods along the sound is irreparable.

As one fisherman lamented recently, “I’m just kind of waiting for the end, you know?  One legacy of the settlement surrounding the spill is that it put in place an ecosystem-monitoring program called Gulf Watch Alaska.

In the most recent Gallup poll taken this month, Americans again put the environment ahead of economic development, possibly sobered in the aftermath of fracking contamination, coal ash and chemical spills.

You can mark the purge of the Republican Party of its moderate and liberal wings by poll results showing a steep dive in concern about the environment after the year 2000, ranking it below the economy by 2001.  Still, even today, 1-in-3 affiliated with that party give the nod to the environment.

Especially interesting from this year’s results is that Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 rank the environment over economic development by two to one.  Every age group gives the nod to the environment except those over 65 years of age.

As a moderate Independent, I pay close attention to ConservAmerica, Republicans who are gradually growing a greener party.  Unlike those in my state who notoriously moved to outlaw any mention of global warming, there are Republicans such as The Michigan Conservative Energy Forum who are worried.

Of course, climate change has been politicized by people who are increasingly employed as and referred to as “professional confusers.”  Here is a link to a paper I read recently quantifying the consensus that global warming is due to humans and another clarifying what we know.

My favorite resource on climate change is The Consensus Project website.  But George Marshall who blogs about climate change denial wrote recently using the Ukrainian crisis and the annexation of Crimea as an example of how it isn’t just about territory but used as a pretense for consolidating control of linguistics as well.

That is what makes being a moderate and a political Independent so difficult at times, seeing through professional confusers who politicize linguistics on all sides.

To paraphrase 20th-century humorist Don Marquis, Moderates, and especially Independents, must always remember:

“An idea should never be held responsible for the people who believe in it.”

Construction Is Just The Beginning

Several years ago, Dr. Dana Clark, a friend of mine who teaches in the business school at Appalachian State University penned an article warning communities bent on building mega-facilities that the initial cost will be just a fraction of the overall cost.

Partially, this is because construction since WWII, according to the Urban Land Institute, has been designed only to last 20 to 30 years.  This may be why the DBAP has just undergone another renovation that probably exceeds its original construction cost twenty years ago.

This time though, the City of Durham is on the hook for no more than $12 million with the owners of the Durham Bulls picking up about $8 million and agreeing to a lease keeping the storied team until at least 2033.

I remember glares of awkwardness I got from some when I corrected the misimpression left with Minor League Baseball officials by other economic developers during a tour many years ago that the acclaimed ballpark was a privately-held initiative.

At least now it could be argued that a fraction will be, as well as responsibility for operation and revenue-sharing, a win-win for the City.

This renovation was more than a face lift.  It included a new video board with more than 3.8 million LEDs, 8,000 linear feet of drain pipe under the field, 14 dump trucks of infield clay, 164 clusters of lights, 189 dump trucks of sand on which to lay a new field and all new seats with higher backs.

A new club level (air-conditioned restaurant/bar/event space) will be open to skybox owners, patrons and to season ticket holders who purchase a club membership for an additional fee, well worth it during hot, humid summer nights.  It is also available to groups for $45 per person.

The opening pitch this week to the new season will use one of 8,568 baseballs the Bulls will go through this season, about eight to ten dozen every home game.

The renovations were accelerated rather than phased because Durham hosts the Triple A baseball All-Star Game this year including five days of events.

Initial construction is only the beginning when it comes to cultural infrastructure, including facilities.  DBAP, it can be argued, spurred redevelopment of the historic Old Bull and Lucky Strike factories as well as construction of three new buildings.  Here again, the portion for local government increased to around $100 million.

In time, the local governments here will recoup some of the investment in increased property taxes, minus the impact of tenants dislocated from other parts of Durham.

As a baseball fan, I enjoyed watching the team in the now restored historic DAP north of city center, but given the alternative of losing the team, I think building the new ballpark just south of city center was our only option.

Built to look historic, the DBAP fits seamlessly with the historic built-scape part of Durham’s sense of place and has been leveraged through relentless community destination marketing into visitor-centric economic and cultural development that has repaid its original cost.

I’m not sure taxpayers would go along with cultural facilities like this if they knew the eventual lifetime costs, especially in destinations where it seems someone went shopping for culture one day and bought one of everything.

Cultural facilities, if tied to the indigenous distinctiveness of a community, are as important as any other type of infrastructure.

But as a friend of mine explained at the meeting of a state business lobby held in Durham last week, all too often the private sector refuses now to pay for public infrastructure because it sees it as a transfer rather than as the economic lifeblood it is.

At least the owners of the Durham Bulls seem to view it as a partnership.

Creating Contentment

While standing behind a lady waiting to check in at the doctors office, I kidded her about the time it was taking.

“I hate Durham,” she volunteered.  I moved here a year ago and I came here to change my address.  I’m moving.

Without telling her I had once been in the business of helping visitors, including more than 85% of newcomers who come here as visitors first, I apologized that she had ended up making a decision that was not best for her.

I finished our exchange by mentioning that her sentiment was shared by 1-in-50 Durham residents compared to the nearly 20-to-1 Durham residents who have just the opposite impression of living here.

She was visibly stunned as we all are when we find ourselves feeling so strongly about something that we assume is a broadly held notion.  It isn’t just the Tea Party political movement that labors so.

Even when less strongly held negative feelings are included, more than 9-in-10 Durham residents are pleased with it as a place to live.  Ideally though, we would have helped the 5% who aren’t make a better decision for themselves.

Advertising is just one element of community marketing but as a form of “yelling” it is the most blunt, and as such, fundamentally differs from marketing overall in a critical way.

Advertising was invented as a means to create discontent.  Marketing is a way to help people make decisions that are best for themselves, even when it does not go your way as a marketer.  Especially when it doesn’t go your way.

That’s why marketing is supposed to be a conversation as opposed to advertising, which as someone once said is like “that guy” at a party who goes on and on about himself not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s why people who are that way in conversation tend to think of marketing only in terms of big ad campaigns which fail to influence or create interest and result in a negative return on investment.

Adverting is dead by its own hand.  Inundated on average now by 10,000 ads a day, consumers have finally just tuned out.

The first ad in America was run in 1704.  Dr. Freddie Parker at NCCU here in Durham has conducted studies of ads used to recapture slave runaways in North Carolina between 1775 and 1840.

Advertising became institutionalized in the decades after the Civil War.  Near the turn of the century modern advertising was shaped to create discontent in order to push the use of products such as soap, deodorant and mouth wash.

By the early 1900s, psychologists were being hired by ad agencies to create messages of discontent.

In their new book to be released next month entitled, Smart Money Smart Kids, talk-radio financial guru Dave Ramsey and his daughter Rachel Cruze write about how hard it is to teach contentment and to teach kids how to see through advertising designed to create discontent.

By 1984, adverting began to decline in effectiveness until now, it is effectively worthless if not a negative.

Unfortunately, many marketers have difficulty with the notion of conversations with consumers or the idea that the objective is to help them find contentment.

Scientific studies show that at the heart of meditation’s effectiveness is contentment in the here and now.  Even in my former field of community marketing to generate visitor-centric economic and cultural development, studies have shown that the biggest boost from a vacation is planning it.

Only very relaxing vacations such as those I take with my grandsons and daughter to a lake in the northern Rockies each summer boost happiness after the return.  Travel overall these days is more likely to result in anxiety.

It may vary for individuals, but proof still that marketing should be most about helping people.