A Tribute To Durham & Sense of Place

A few months ago, as preparations were underway for a photo essay on Durham, North Carolina, Bernie Mann, publisher of the acclaimed Our State Magazine, headed down I-85/40 from his offices in Greensboro as he often does to consult with Shelly Green, a 15-year veteran as guardian of Durham’s sense of place.

In parting, he mentioned plans to highlight Durham’s sense of place, but to see it you’ll need to rush to a newsstand for the January 2014 issue.  You can see the photographs and hear the photographers talk about them in a video linked here on the magazine’s website.

While you are at it, check out some other Durham features the Our State digital team has assembled including a fun ride through town on I-85 north to the soundtrack of 1984’s classic anthem “I’ve Got A Line On You” by Spirit courtesy of Freeway Jim.

It puts new light on sense of place at every touch point.  Mann’s digital team also assembled a playlist of contemporary music from artists who call Durham home, featuring among others “Younger Days” by the band Mount Moriah, a favorite of mine during excursions on the Cross Bones through the countryside.

Coverage such as this is cultivated over years of interaction and exchange.  It is forged on a bedrock of trust and authenticity, which is why it is called “earned media” and considered more credible.  But as I’ll note later, both the outcomes and the outputs can also be measured.

Bernie Mann made his name in radio first selling advertising and then owning and operating more than twelve stations.  I met him more than 15 years ago at the start of a friendship when he bought Our State gradually increasing subscriptions by nine times to 200,000 and the size from 48 pages per issue to more than 200 now.

Different, though, than most city and state lifestyle magazines, Mann kept the focus on “place” by maintaining a ratio of 60/40 editorial to advertising, and never letting subject matter be dictated by who advertises as many similar publications do.

But beyond that, Bernie not only loves North Carolina dearly, he has an extraordinary sense about what makes a place distinctive, some of which he may have gleaned from his connection with Green over the span he has built the magazine and she has been responsible for Durham’s sense of place.

He didn’t just seek Green out as one of the top community destination marketing execs in the nation (she just finished two terms presiding over accreditation of community destination marketing organizations worldwide but now serves on the Destination Marketing Association International board.)

Mann values her understanding of holistic marketing, especially what is called “earned media” as contrasted to paid media advertising.  This is the part of marketing that works with outlets to provide background, photos and advice to make coverage as accurate and true to place as possible.

Many community destination marketing organizations are anachronistically trapped in sales as a strategy based on the myth that it is the only marketing element that can be measured with a pipeline.  They dismiss earned media as just news releases and love advertising merely as a means of ego gratification.

Leading edge execs learned decades ago that every element of marketing must be and can be measured, not just for outcomes but also outputs.  As one marketing expert paraphrased Sun-Tzu recently:

“Measuring outcomes, but not outputs, is the slowest path to victory. Measuring outputs, but not outcomes, is the noise before defeat.”

In his blog series entitled “The Measurement Myth,” Mark Weiner, the CEO of Prime Research, also argues that earned media and other elements of marketing can emulate the “sales funnel” if it helps marketers move to a more holistic approach to marketing.

Many linear approaches used in my day such as the “sales funnel” and adaptations for marketing overall as part of explaining the process to generate economic development are still useful when informing stakeholders with limited or outmoded levels of understanding.

But Weiner and others such as Brian Solis, McKinsey & Company (image shown in this blog) and DCVB’s Green also argue that the “funnel” is a limited metaphor because true customer engagement is really best represented by a series of concentric loops.

Mann may have crossed into his 80s but he definitely grasps this cycle of stakeholder development when it comes to not only sources of subject matter but as potential subscribers and advertisers.

He views them not as resources to be exploited but as friends and associates on a two-way street.

Clarifying Durham Poverty

It doesn’t take away from the importance of such an issue that news stories comparing the poverty rates in various cities and counties in North Carolina nearly always fail to index the percentages.

A question was raised in the Raleigh paper on New Year’s Day about why Durham’s poverty rate is higher than Raleigh and Cary’s.

If when reported, the percentages had been indexed to ethnic make-up, the more obvious question would have probably been, “Why are poverty rates in Raleigh and Cary so high.

Give or take, Durham’s rate of 19.4% is about three points higher than Raleigh’s and Cary’s but Durham is also a significantly much more diverse community.

This is noteworthy because poverty rates in North Carolina for African American and Latino residents are two and a half times that for Caucasians.  Durham is, respectively, as much as three times more diverse than Cary or Raleigh.

Just as puzzling is why so many people are disturbed by the poverty rate when they move to Durham from Greensboro.  They are seemingly unaware that the poverty rate there is as high or even higher.

Perhaps the misperceptions are fueled by the tendency of Durham residents to talk more openly and passionately about issues it wants to improve.

This is also why in the mid-1990s, to avoid being caught up with just headlines, Durham officials followed the lead of its agency for visitor-centric economic and cultural development and began to benchmark community comparisons against a comp set of communities across the state and nation.

This is a best practice means of not just explaining away issues, but putting them in a context where true anomalies can be readily detected which would otherwise be clouded by passions or news headlines.

Unfortunately, this benchmarking approach has not been applied broadly or deeply enough.  Not only has it been neglected in reference to problems such as poverty, but also areas such as cultural facilities, urban forestry and overall community curb appeal.

Even where they have been effectively applied in areas such as crime and school scores, often the results have not been used strategically to buffer problem-solvers from news reports which according to analysts, are only slightly biased toward negative news but heavily biased toward extremes.

An example in Durham is the media’s obsession with crimes and rates of crime, particularly violent crimes such as homicides. Durham is not exceptional or out of the norm in its overall crime or its violent crime, so it diverts officials from addressing types of crimes where it is above the norm, such as burglary and robbery.

While the communities weren’t indexed for variables, the report by a long-time Durham resident and columnist in the Raleigh paper was loaded with useful context to inform yesterday’s 50th anniversary of the declaration of the War on Poverty.

In 1960, four years before that declaration, 4-in-10 North Carolinians lived in poverty, including nearly 1-in-3 Durham County residents.

We can debate whether the programs responsible for wiping out so much poverty need to be perpetually overhauled or have become too brittle, or whether they were shortchanged, but the fact that they made a huge difference seems indisputable.

Another view of the statistics shows that poverty levels in America dropped precipitously from 1959 to 1970 before efforts to eradicate it became politicized and gridlocked.

Not coincidentally, in my opinion as a political Independent, this is also the time span where we invested heavily to broaden the middle class.  Maybe it would be worthwhile revising that span for solutions to help get back on track.

The answers still aren’t clear to me although I’ve read and thought about the issue a lot.  But as conservative critic Joe Queenan, who was raised in poverty, has written so eloquently, “Poverty is a pathologically enduring, immutable condition. Not a lifestyle choice.”

So I wasn’t at all surprised that the mandatory drug testing conservatives sought to impose (to varying degrees) in 30 states found that only 2.6 percent of poor people receiving public assistance tested positive for drugs compared to 8.7 of the general population.

The rate testing positive was as low as 1.2 percent or less in some states, leading one policy analyst to refer to this testing as “a bad cure in search of a problem.”

Similar analysis has found that poor people are less likely to turn to crime than those with much higher incomes.  We also know now that the stereotypes used to demonize the poor in the late 1970s and 1980s were misleading.

Far too much brain power is being wasted on playing ideological offence and defense at the expense of the poor.   We can do better, and we must do better, because “there, but for the grace of God” go any of us.

Scenic Character’s Leading Role in Sense of Place

Greensboro is the third largest city in North Carolina.  But according to friends, old and new, who live there, it is bent on mimicking the fourth largest city, Durham. 

Unfortunately, they are not mimicking Durham for its distinct sense of place.

Instead Greensboro seems drawn to mimic the corrosive influences that make communities the same, appealing, in the words of Dr. Scott Russell Sanders, only to those for whom “tourism is another form of shopping, treating the whole country as a gigantic mall.”

By this he is referring not only to shopping or malls per se, but to  generic attributes that make communities just one of many vs. distinct.

According to Sanders, in a speech I heard him deliver in 2006, the salvation for communities clutching to sense-of-place is neighborhood activism.  Durham bears Sanders out but only as long as it can withstand what he calls “Goliaths,” warning that:

“…Goliath never sleeps, never takes no for an answer, never runs out of money or political friends, and most of the time…gets its way.”

I witnessed the sacrifice of North Carolina’s distinctiveness on a cross-state road-trip last weekend.  Observing how commercial out-of-state billboard interests are sating their greed by destroying roadside trees and viewsheds caused me to think about my reading habits over the years and the pivotal role scenic character plays in appeal.

I’ve always been an avid reader, but it has been marked by streaks restricted to either fiction or non-fiction.  After law school in the mid-1970s, I couldn’t stand to read non-fiction.  In fact, I took a brief break from reading altogether.

During my near-decade in Alaska, I read mostly suspense and/or historical fiction such as written by Uris, Ludlum and Michener.  When I moved to Durham, I turned to non-fiction except for the latter 1990s when I delved into Swedish crime novellas written by Henning Mankell after they became available in English.

As a rule I avoid movies, especially made-for-television movies based on books that I have read and enjoyed, perhaps to dodge disappointment.

Ironically, this aversion proves strongest for adaptations of books such as Mankell’s where descriptions of landscape serve as a leading character vs. only as backdrop.

I have been drawn to three notable exceptions, spurred by the advent of streaming services.  The Jesse Stone series of TV-movies based on Robert Parker novels, the 2010 feature film Winter’s Bone based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, and most recently the Wallander series based on works by Mankell.

In each production, hauntingly dramatic landscapes play featured roles alongside superb acting by casts featuring Tom Selleck, Jennifer Lawrence (in her breakout role) and Kenneth Branaugh.  These adaptations live up to the novels and give distinctiveness to plots that might otherwise have seemed similar.

Of course, distinctive soundtracks also play a pivotal role including Nostalgia by Emily Barker for Wallander, Hardscrabble Elegy by Dickon Hinchliffe in Winter’s Bone and music by Jeff Beal for Jesse Stone.

All of this is to say that the distinctive sense of place for communities and states must also give a leading role to preservation of scenic character, lest they succumb to the corrosive influences of blight that relegate them as “monotonous, ephemeral, rootless and ugly,” appealing only a form of generic shopping.

Unfortunately, as in so many ways, my adopted home of North Carolina is headed in the wrong direction.

A Glimpse At Service Design

As I drove up to a resort in the mountains of North Carolina last weekend as the guest of a mutual friend, I pondered how difficult it must be to run a professional association such as the one for community organizations focused on visitor-centric economic development.

Of the 10 trends in that field that were recently highlighted for 2014 by one of its truly best and brightest, all but seven should have been engaged by members two decades ago and another over a decade ago.

The speed at which organizations such as this can propel members forward is lugged down by the inertia of old schoolers or worse, those so so eager to appear smart they don’t have time to get smart, which is now research-proven to be an either/or proposition.

Running associations is a tough job, perpetually hampered by the lowest or slowest common denominator.

To me, only one of trends noted, “service design,” qualifies as new, and even at that it is a nearly three-year-old concept or re-concepting of a concept that emerged from EU-funded research at the Management Center of Innsbruck, a very entrepreneurial institution of higher education.

As it somehow so often does, last year the tourism agency in Durham, where I live in retirement happened to not only be one of the first dozen destination marketing organizations in the U.S. to be exposed to “service design” but as is its culture, among the very first to start integrating it into action.

At the basis of this new way of thinking about service is mobile ethnography.

Instead of filling out comment cards or surveys, now in a way that is much much more useful and consistent than social media chatter or facility ratings, visitors with soon be empowered with an app that is now in the demo stage called “myServiceFellow.”

It empowers a traveler to rate service at every touchpoint of the entire travel experience and then upload it at the end of the trip where it can be accessed, aggregated and analyzed by individual businesses or organizations also concerned with the equally important service spaces between commercial interactions.

This goes far deeper and far broader than ratings apps and it will peel back a layer undetected by the businesses involved, but more importantly, it will be far more useful to those concerned with the entire travel experience spectrum such as community destination marketing organizations.

If I had remembered to download the app prior to my trip, or looked closely enough to see how easy it was to use the demo,  I could have noted:

• When we stopped for breakfast in Greensboro, the desecration of a sea of billboards on that stretch of I 85/40 and that my significant other’s hash browns weren’t crispy as requested.

 

• How sad it was to see on arrival that instead of celebrating foremost the iconic 100-year-old Grove Park brand as an Omni Resort, the chain sublimated the Inn’s identity below the chain name, a source of disgust overheard several times from other guests.

   

• How a misspelling made it problematic to retrieve my Jeep from valet parking.

 

• How cool it was that wait staff fastidiously and subtly substituted a black napkin for a white one to avoid napkin fuzzies on dark pants.

 

• How a plugged up drain marred the wonderful walk-in shower experience in the spa wing.

 

• How neglecting to wipe the windows of finger prints interrupted afternoon views of Asheville in the valley below.

 

• How the only one of many stores at the resort to carry batteries had apparently been out of AAAs for a couple of weeks.

 

• How irritating it was at a stop for gas and coffee that a convenience store stocked flavored half and half but offered only powdered creamer to customers wanting regular half and half.

 

• How arrogant Fairway Outdoor Advertising is to flaunt digital billboards, contrarian to Asheville’s unique sense of place.

 

• How phenomenally beautiful and billboard free major parts of I40 are through North Carolina, and how hideous parts that aren’t have become.

“Service design” is predicated upon a deeper, more empathy-based type of research.  It is determined to understand consumer motivation not just behavior and to understand actual specifics and patterns, not just general recall.

Unfortunately though, I suspect it will still show up on lists of “new” trends for decades to come.

Guess Who Didn't Get The Memo!

Something ironic struck me as I read this weekend that Phil Everly had passed away from an illness caused by a lifetime of smoking.

Phil was the high harmony behind his brother Don’s melodies, a duo that for many of us coming age in the ‘50s and ‘60s first fused country and rock music and inspired the Beatles, Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel and many performers popular today such as Norah Jones and Green Day’s Billie Jo Armstrong.

This coming spring, it will be 15 years since the order became effective for all tobacco advertising to be removed from roadside billboards, long after it had been banned on other types of advertising.

Tobacco companies shrugged because they were only spending 6% of their advertising dollars on billboards anyway.  The medium just wasn’t effective, especially compared to in-store ads.

It isn’t just tobacco companies that find roadside billboards useless. Today, studies show that fewer than 1-in-10 Americans, 1-in-25 marketing professionals and 1-in 33 small businesses find them interesting or useful.

Of course, only 31% of Americans enjoy any type of advertising.  In states such as North Carolina, billboard advertising in particular turns off nearly eight people for every one who finds them useful, because they are viewed as blight.

So what did the geniuses who wanted to mount an anti-smoking campaign do as part of the settlement to remove the tobacco ads from billboards?

They put up 3,700 billboards across the nation, obviously guided to do so by one of the few marketers still under the spell of the obsolete technology, to get their message out.

Or perhaps they were assuming they were better marketers than the tobacco companies, or maybe they fell victim to the campaign donation savvy of the billboard barons?

Regardless of why, over the five subsequent years, it was estimated that cigarette smoking alone continued to be responsible for $193 billion in annual health-related economic losses, half of that from lost productivity.

From 1950, when some tobacco companies marketed cigarettes as a way to prevent respiratory and other diseases, until 2010, the number of tobacco farms in the United States fell from half a million to just more than 9,000.

But guess who didn’t get the memo?

While public health agencies are desperately trying to reduce tobacco use, the largest healthcare provider in the nation, the U.S. Military, includes the purchase of $85 million in tobacco products in its budget.

That’s nearly 60% more than taxpayers spent that same year on a campaign - including some advertisements including some on billboards - that a follow-up study reports helped encourage 100,000 people quit using tobacco products.

Even if the average of 6% are successful long-term, taxpayers should recoup some of the costs of the CDC campaign in healthcare savings.  But the meager result illustrates why studies now show advertising to have a negative return on investment

Granted, the campaign involved much more than advertising and the term billboards included more out-of-home advertising than just roadside billboards.

But one wonders why the CDC has fallen for the logic that it can successfully use advertising mediums such as billboards to discourage tobacco use when the tobacco companies found them ineffective to encourage tobacco use?

It was noted that the tobacco industry spends more in three days than the CDC campaign does in a year.  But if I were targeting that campaign, I would forgo billboards and evaluate more credible marketing tactics than advertising and/or carefully study and mimic the tactics of tobacco companies.  Just sayin’.

So it isn’t just private companies that fail to connect the dots for their marketing initiatives when it come to sustainability.

Of even more irony is that in 2014 and 2015 we celebrate two 50th anniversaries of events that took place as the Everly Brothers remarkable string of hit singles came to an end in 1964 and 1965.

One is the first Surgeon General’s Report on the dangers of smoking to health which led the following year to the division of CDC conducting the anti-smoking campaigns.

The other is the Highway Beautification Act which was intended to forever limit billboards to industrial areas.

Maybe the observances will help various federal and state agencies begin to connect the dots.