A Signature Report and the Coming Primacy of Analytics

Each spring, an incredibly useful interagency report covering a comprehensive range of metrics and involving efforts all levels of government, including volunteer and non-profit efforts, is compiled and published regarding efforts to keep streams and roadways in North Carolina clean.

The heavy lifting is done each year by the the Beautification Office of the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT,) which also keeps the reports from past years on its web page.

This office falls under the department’s acclaimed Roadside Environmental Unit, headed when I arrived in Durham twenty five years ago by a close friend, the legendary Bill Johnson who spearheaded the wildflower and the scenic byway programs to name a few.

To paraphrase something once written about Durham songwriter Don Schlitz, “there are millions of people who know Bill Johnson but have never heard of him.”

There is currently a lot of talk about North Carolina’s brand, but no one has done more than Bill to shape it, although some actually given that task have enabled desecration instead.

It was as Bill retired to the tiny crossroads of Sims, NC in 2001 after thirty years as an NCDOT engineer that lawmakers mandated the Interagency Report coordinated by an office in his former Unit.

Bill still champions the preservation of North Carolina’s scenic attributes.  He passionately believes in the words of a mutual friend that our state is a truly “unique collection of qualities and characteristics” including environmental.

He understands more about branding than most of those charged with doing it for North Carolina.  There are powerful forces wanting to take it back to an era of desecration a hundred years ago when forests were seas of stumps replaced by seas of billboards.

You see, no matter what we say North Carolina’s brand is, its brand is indelibly stamped first and last by the condition of its roadsides and green infrastructure as visitors, including site selection executives for expanding or relocating businesses, arrive and depart.

The interagency report dealing with aspects of scenic preservation and protection is produced now under the leadership of George Kapetanakis.  It is invaluable to residents and policy makers.

But most of all, it is invaluable to the hundreds of groups and agencies as well as thousands of volunteers who collectively work to clean up the incredible mess that research shows is deliberately caused by just 4-every-100 people, 17% if you include those who are just careless.

In my experience, many of these groups and volunteers, sensing how overwhelming it can seem to keep roadsides and streams and communities appealing, are vulnerable to activity traps instead of carefully measuring performance against annual metrics that can be found in this report.

I do my best in the groups with which I am involved to encourage a more sustainable, strategic and scalable approach, but I get far more blank stares than nods.

I’m used to it.  Being passionate but analytically-driven during my four decade career made me highly effective but a bit of an odd duck.  I would often overhear someone say, “I like him but I don’t get him.”

Even when I arrived in Durham for the last half of my career, a community whose largest employers are in the business of being research and data-driven, I would often get complaints from detractors delivered second hand bemoaning about why I did so much research.

Showing the power of information though, few realized that only a few percentage points of our budget was devoted to research.  For all but the last decade of my career, I had to do nearly all of the analysis to convert research into action.

It seemed like more because we widely distributed analysis in hopes it would be of use to others in community as well as reinforce that we weren’t just driving community marketing by the seat of our pants.

By far, it was the most difficult position to fill.  Even people good with numbers often struggled with how to make analysis relevant and to pin point it to strategic initiatives.

Most of my peers just filed the studies away as something to check off the list.  Many DMO execs today still do.

Data, and especially now with the advent of “big data,” is prevalent everywhere but still only 1-in-8 in a recent survey conducted for SAS Institute based in nearby Cary have become “analytic innovators,” which somehow came naturally to me and also to my successor.

According to the study conducted in conjunction with the MIT Management Review, six-in-ten professionals report now feeling pressure today to become more data-driven and analytical.

While two-thirds still sense that decisions are being made the old fashioned way, based on management opinion and experience, another survey of senior marketing leaders finds that “seat of the pants” approach is fading fast.

This study commissioned by executive search and succession giant Spencer Stuart shows that while 70% of chief marketing executives consider analytics and creativity to be equally important, three times as many now rank data analysis and orientation as a top-three expertise needed for future marketers compared to those feeling that way about creativity.

It’s no surprise to me that a “strategic mindset” transcends both.  To paraphrase a Spencer Stuart blog post, tomorrow’s CMO is more likely to be “chief logic officer” than “chief magic officer.”

If they haven’t already as Appalachian State University has, business schools training tomorrow’s community destination marketing execs should take very careful note.  This is also important information for anyone just pursuing this career because they “like to travel.”

Looking over the syllabus for the annual Brandworks University, an MBA-level event held each May in Madison, Wisconsin, there is no “flash and bang,” or “shock and awe” during this premiere of all marketing events which draws the top marketers in every field.

Instead, it is all about data, analytics and science.

That’s why you could find Durham’s chief marketing executive eating it up.  The organization embedded data and analytics in its DNA from the start.

This genetic sequence helped Durham’s destination marketing leapfrog more established competition where they are still fading in the “rear view mirror.”  I predict that in the future anyone hoping to move up in a DMO will need to learn how to understand, analyze and apply data as a pre-requisite.

Unfortunately, the Spencer Stuart study found that few are doing that, forcing organizations to look far more frequently to recruit people from places such as strategic consulting firms and startups.  Fewer than 1-in-10 find the necessary affinity for analytics necessary for executive succession on existing teams.

One respondent quipped that its like “finding a few needles in a haystack.”

When I started in community destination marketing in the early to mid 1970s, many executives came up through sales.  Eventually far more came from the marketing side of which sales is an element.

Judging by my succession, analytics will be the background for leading edge DMO execs.  And note this isn’t so much about math, although statistics is useful.

Keep in mind that the dominant organizations of the future according to one of the studies above will be “analytics innovators,” a culture that is driven by sophisticated data analysis and strategic application.

Being a data-geek isn’t required as much as the ability to see patterns in the data and then translate them quickly and consistently into strategy and action.

It came natural to me.  I was never successful at training it into someone.  But I could sure see it in someone when manifested.

Reflections on the Knees of Bees

My first memory of a bumble bee is laying next to some clover in the lawn stretching from our ranch house to the road, watching a western bumblebee dance around.  Almost forgotten is that it was probably made indelible by my mom calling warnings to me from her vegetable garden.

The memory came back to me a few days ago when a “Common Eastern Bumblebee” danced in my line of sight while I was taking a break from helping a friend clean out the garage in preparation for Junk King to haul away unwanted items.

This franchise recycles about 60% of what they collect and dispose of the rest.  It is an old business model.  I have a friend who cleaned out basements as a kid just to be able to turn in cans and bottles for the deposit and another whose family business years ago was doing what Junk King has made into a formula enterprise.

The bee hovered there while I was admiring the incredible stands of trees that developers and builders retained in Buckwater Creek, a neighborhood that backs up to a greenway along the steep ravine of the Eno River.

You can distinguish the Common Eastern Bumblebee (page 14) by its big, all black back end, separated from a head of that color by a lighter yellow midsection. By the way, the knees of a bee are the mid-segments of their legs where they collect pollen.

The bumblebee I first saw in the shadow of the Tetons was probably the “Central Bumblebee” (page 35) common along the western edge of the Rockies because its back end was yellow on top and black on the bottom.

Alarmingly, I just read that extremely aggressive Africanized honey bees, aka “killer bees,” were imported into Brazil just after the time I was studying that bumblebee in my early years.  They are now as far north as Palisade, Colorado along the western slopes of the Southern Rockies.

Swarms in the US have already killed horses and people.

I’m not a bee guy but I learned a little from my maternal grandfather when he was a water master in the 1950s at Stewart Dam on the Bear River, about two miles off the route of the Oregon-California Trail where wagon wheel ruts are still visible in that the corner of southeast Idaho.

His job was to monitor flows and divert part of the river via the Rainbow Canal through a complex of wetlands where it was cleansed of sediment and runoff before flowing into Bear Lake which stretches across the border with Utah.

His objective was to optimize water use for wildlife, power, irrigation, recreation and municipal use, but during parts of the year, it left him with time to pursue hobbies such as raising sheep and geese, keeping hives of honey bees, and of course, “paling” around with me during frequent visits.

I never asked him why, but I suspect his work gave him a close-up understanding of the importance of ecosystem services and ecological balance.

Bumblebees are more effective than honey bees, in some ways, as pollinators.  Both are raised commercially.  Bumblebees seem more sensitive to habitat loss but many studies now show that bees are also very sensitive to neonicotinoid pesticides, made from a derivative of nicotine.

I’ve learned that an example is the Bayer Advanced 2 in 1 Systemic Rose and Flower Care I’ve been applying the last few years to clusters of Knock Out and Lady Banks roses in my yard as fertilizer and to keep them from being devoured by bugs such as aphids and attacked by fungus.

It makes sense that being systemic it would also affect bees but there is a lot of money involved in studies both pro and con, but the weight now is leaning toward these pesticides as the cause, which are also widely used on corn, as being responsible for bill kills.

It was discovered about seven years ago in an archeological dig at Tel Rehov, a mound in Israel’s lush Beth-Shean Valley about 17 miles south of the Sea of Galilee, that humans there were cultivating bee hives between 9 and 10 centuries B.C.E, the first discovered in the Middle East and the earliest yet discovered anywhere.

Bayer Cropscience is one of many research concerns based in Durham, and this last April, the company opened its North American Bee Care Center here, a partner to one it already has in Monheim, Germany.

Part of the mission of the Bee Care Centers is to bring scientists and stakeholders together.  Another part is communication.  The Wire, part of the Atlantic Media group, reported recently that based on the Bayer Cropscience blog, “2013 was a great year for bee PR in America.”

However, several bee advocacy organizations including the Pollinator Stewardship Council, the National Honey Bee Advisory Board, the American Honey Producers Association and the American Beekeeping Federation have sued the EPA overs its approval of similar pesticides by Dow, requiring instead warning labels.

Having a lot at stake, Bayer argues that colonies of honey bees worldwide have increased, not decreased, from 50 years ago and that periodic colony losses have been observed for centuries.  It is also wining and dining lawmakers and Congressional staff.

Bayer points the finger at the Varroa mite.  The USDA notes that annual colony loss has been consistent over the last seven years.  Reminded that ecological imbalance is rarely due to just one cause, these new studies find at least one link is to the use of neonics.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the North Carolina General Assembly doesn’t try to insert a ban on the use of these empirical studies into legislation to bar any local efforts to shepherd urban forest canopy, just as it did with reference to studies on climate change in a previous session.

Choked for funding by lawmakers, regulators too have been complicit, it seems.  The EPA should have conducted independent research on neonicotnoids rather than relying solely on Bayer’s findings and brushing aside concerns about Dow’s field tests.

Much more is at stake than profits.

Neurological research has found that hearing and seeing the birds and the bees gives a cognitive signal to humans that the world is healthy.  This should dictate that we error on the side of caution when it comes to things that threaten them.

In the meantime, here is a link to the guide for Conserving Bumble Bees.  And if you ever come across swarms of bees like the one shown here down in Raleigh/Wake County or as one was reported in Downtown Durham recently, contact the Durham Beekeepers for removal.

The Proverbial Conundrum of Community Revitalization

A good example of what I mean when I say that community marketing is 2/3rds “lowering barriers” is an aspect we backed into during my final startup 25 years ago in Durham, North Carolina.

Even today, this part of the job is under the radar of or considered an inconvenience by far too many destination marketing organizations.

We came to earn a franchise for this aspect while leveraging data or information-based strategy-making and marketing decision-making, somewhat novel at the time, and it seems still only given lip service by many economic development organizations in general.

Not only did that approach help us much more quickly leapfrog much more established competitors but a side effect was that within a few months of startup we had earned a “go to” reputation with financiers, developers and those seeking commercial tenants.

I noted it when a week or two after start up out-of-town appraisers began to drop by up to several times a week and were extremely impressed with the results of even our initial metrics.

It was particularly clear that our perspective and back up was reversing negative impressions volunteered about Durham while they were conducting similar appraisals in other parts of the state, especially in a nearby rival community.

Word quickly spread among local businesses and soon I was assisting four or five appraisals or reappraisals a week and did so until I retired more than two decades later.

Reappraisals are the updated value computations required by lenders before renewing or extending finance for existing developments.

Soon new project developers caught on and we became the “go to” place to inform appraisers and financiers on the front end of projects while at the same time, we were earning a reputation for developing reliable estimates of community impact for local officials.

None of this had fit under the customary heading of community marketing unless as I did at the time, you put it under the heading of community relations and do it on the side as a way to further leverage information we had developed to inform promotional decisions.

Promotion of existing assets and community development always go hand in hand.  Community-destination marketing organizations are involved in what economists call “demand-driven” economic development.

This is the process where marketing fuels demand for existing developments and the market responds by generating new or adaptive reuse of existing developments.

But lowering the barriers to sustainable financing is a function of information which is best leveraged from destination marketing organizations where the data is already gleaned to shape and measure their primary task of telling the community’s story.

As I would soon learn from earning this franchise, unusual for the time, parallel redistribution of marketing data for uses such as these may be equal in importance to the role of many traditional promotion techniques.

As word spread, DMOs in other communities began to call because they were being asked for similar information.  But what was easy for us because data was a strategic pillar to our marketing, seemed overwhelming and foreign to many peers.

Seemingly effortless to some, distilling and applying perceptions and insights from data must be cultivated.  It is a way of thinking about and shaping action that doesn’t derive from titles or position.

The value was confirmed to me during the early 90s evolution of an adaptive reuse project in downtown Durham that subsequently triggered and continues to trigger a chain reaction of of millions of square feet similar projects.

Leaving a presentation, a banker told me in front of others that in his opinion we had stumbled onto the answer to the proverbial conundrum of “chicken or egg” in community revitalization and development, at least for Durham.

He went on to make me self conscious in front of strategic partners by lavishing praise on the data we had provided, both hard data and analysis.

To him, it had removed any obstacle to providing the financing, but I knew that was only part of closing any deal, aspects of which were the forte of economic development partners on the supply-side.

To me, it confirmed the time we had been devoting to communication and data to lower barriers to financing was as important to un-inhibiting visitation as this same communication and data was to promoting Durham to prospective visitors.

The barriers to lower went far beyond correcting misimpressions.  When millions and millions of dollars are at stake, data-driven insights also proactively put the community narrative in a perspective necessary for the financial markets.

His and subsequent words from lenders and appraisers over the year also confirmed the wisdom of the North Carolina General Assembly for legislation restricting the diversion of dollars meant for community marketing into product development to no more than a third.

The meaning of marketing was also stipulated.

Durham’s community organization is so fortunate that my successor has an even better ability to distill data into insight.  This qualification for succession even rivals the indispensible grasp of and and ability to convey both the organization’s story as well as the community’s.

Hopefully these observations are useful to a new generation of community marketers.

Looking Back to Confirm a Strategic Foresight

From my paternal grandparents and especially my dad, the phrase, “Don’t trust bankers and lawyers.” was often heard around our ancestral ranch along the Tetons and over family dinners when I was growing up.

For some reason dad threw “doctors” into the old saw as well.

I eventually learned that these were euphemisms for corporate America, a dirty word to family ranchers which are the epitome of what we call today micro businesses or entrepreneurs.

Conceived and born after my dad returned from duties near the end of World War II, I recall that his stories as we went through his gear and memorabilia from that time were ultimately always about technology.

He returned absolutely convinced that huge technological advances, fostered by entrepreneurs, such as those he saw and used training for his tank battalion, were being deliberately prevented from coming to market by corporations seeking to maintain monopolies or oligopolies.

He was as conservative as a conservative can get, but he seemed more like a libertarian or liberal (turning over in his grave) whenever this topic came up, which was often.

When I was 11, my life-long rancher dad took work at Phillips 66, a major petroleum company, to help pay off creditors after a commodities broker absconded with his and their monies.

Lets just say that all of my projects from wood shop to pine derby were spray painted bright orange.

Beginning in the maintenance area, he thrived and worked his way up in corporate management during the revolution in gas pump technologies and the transition of service stations to small retail outlets.

Still, the things he learned and heard only deepened his suspicion that many technological developments like innovations that would revolutionize things such as fuel economy, engine and tire wear, as well as what would lead to hybrid technology, were purposely being bought up and kept off the market.

This, he believed, was because these innovations would not only dramatically reduce profit margins but also strand capital costs and investment in old technologies.

He wasn’t college educated nor had he read the works of economists published before he was born and during his early years.  He just had a practical suspicion back then of what economists have long known, that the marketplace is always at war with itself.

My ancestors were not all horse and cattle ranchers.

Among my great, great-great and great-great-great grandparents were also two gold miners, three who started multiple saw mills and two others in manufacturing, one for molasses before sugar became available in the west and another a carriage maker.

They were also entrepreneurs and evidence that my penchant for startups was in my genes.

They saw the reality of innovation.  It always begins at the margins with entrepreneurs.  Once the technologies threaten the status quo, then large concerns buy the advances up and control or quietly bury them.

Or the entrepreneurs quickly leapfrog established larger or more established competitors trapped in old technologies as I repeatedly did through my start up/entrepreneurial approach during a four-decade career in community destination marketing.

Ironically, once break-throughs are achieved, all too often a few entrepreneurs seem to try and maintain their edge and protect investments by then stifling, slowing, controlling or monopolizing other innovations.

When my dad was the age of my grandsons now, economists were noting this cycle.  But he knew it from real world experience.

If he were alive today, it would be no surprise to him to see newly minted tech giants follow this cycle, some even seeming to try and stifle or undermine the innovation neutrality of the Internet called “net neutrality” (watch the video at this link.)

This may be why we see corporations put so much effort into influence and control of governmental law and policy makers.

Take billboard companies, for instance.  Long obsolete, rather than create value, they pay huge sums in campaign contributions and lobbying to garner permission to create more and more blight along roadside through allies in legislatures.

We all have a front row seat to how desperate corporations can get when new technologies render them obsolete and they find billions trapped in stranded infrastructure.

Just look around: newspapers can’t seem to give away huge Heidelberg printing presses, millions of miles of long distance telephone wires now sit idle, television has collapsed into cable, which is now collapsing into Internet streaming.

Corporations with monopolies to generate and distribute power are like deer in the headlights as low cost energy internet infrastructure quickly evolves around renewables.

None will go quietly.  The battleground is to control government in hopes it will extend their monopolies by either giving them control of the public domain or conspiring to strangle new infrastructure and stifle innovation.

This never works for long, though.  Entrepreneurs have always nibbled along the edges in search of incrementally reducing costs here and there or improving productivity and sometimes they even shift paradigms.

The war within capitalism as foreseen by economists three generations ago is intensifying, but as laid out in the fascinating new book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin makes the case that the paradigm shift now underway marginalizes capitalism itself.

No we won’t all become communists, which has never worked or socialists either, but I am sure in desperation that will be avowed by those sensing the continued eclipse of capitalism over the next 20 or 30 years.

But how will we then find work and make a living?

This, of course, is not a new worry.  It was addressed in a short essay published in 1930 when my dad was eight years old entitled Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren by the economist Dr. John Maynard Keyes.

He wrote about “technological unemployment” a term he coined to describe a condition economists had theorized about since the 19th century.  Keynes surmised that in the near term this would only be a “temporary phase of maladjustment.”

In his mid-1990s book The Road Ahead, Bill Gates wrote that - "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

For the ideas in his 1930 essay, Keynes’ calculus using the “Gate’s Rule” would have been in multiples of decades but in another two his idea may reach its tipping point.

In what Rifkin describes as a near zero marginal world, fewer jobs will be about wealth and profit while far more than even today will turn on “the true character of ‘purposiveness’ with which in varying degrees Nature has endowed almost all of us,” according to Keynes.

He continues, “For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our environment.”

This does not mean that we will all work for the government.

It means that a majority in the future will work in what Peter Barnes coined the “Commons Sector” but that term does not mean we will all work in community destination marketing organizations, which is only one form.

Like DMOs, many may be facilitated by government but independent and for public purpose of which the market as it remains by then is a beneficiary.

But a better example according to Rifkin’s logic may be social enterprises such as cooperatives.  A great example, based in Durham, North Carolina where I live is the Center for Community Self-Help, now expanded statewide.

It is a social enterprise for the purpose of community lending and real estate development, a model now for Durham’s growing reputation as a center for social entrepreneurship.

Co-ops date to colonial times in America and ironically they evolved in the upheaval caused by the first industrial revolution.  They are primarily democratic and self-managed. Think Blue Cross Blue Shields when they started in places such as Durham.

Our ranch was part of the Fremont County Co-op.  Irrigation for our meadows was a co-op.  In the decade before I was born, our ranch gained electricity through independent co-ops.

They were facilitated by small government loans, a movement that by the time I was two years old had brought electricity to every corner of rural America in just eight years.

It was a movement initiated because electric utility companies thought it too expensive and at a fraction the cost they had estimated.  The only think blocking replication of this model for other needs is the powerful lobby near monopolies deployed to block it.

Today, one out of every four Americans belong to a cooperative and the proportion is even higher in other parts of the free world.

In the U.S. alone as of 2011, “29,000 cooperatives with 120 million members , operating in 73,000 places…..account for more than $3 trillion in assets, $500 billion in annual revenue, $25 billion in wages and benefits and nearly 2 million jobs.”

Even when we go to Ace Hardware, Rifkin writes, we’re going to a co-op, same when we buy Land O’ Lakes products.

Unless we “sell out,” a word my dad used often to describe the reluctance people have to stand up to “legal corruption,” and a law is passed banning entrepreneurs, the term “back to the future” may be with us for many decades to come.

The Difference Between Being Treated and Feeling That Way

Durham, North Carolina’s community marketing agency pulls census numbers each year to help community and business leaders understand how unique it is that 2-out-of-3 people working here are non-residents.

This is largely because for decades now Durham has been the job engine for not only its own metro area but also another one much bigger nearby.

On average, each of these commuters spends $131.54 per week work side, not nearly as much as if they lived here, but helpful.

I remember in the 1990s, as head of Durham’s newly formed community marketing agency, having to call a candidate running for mayor of a nearby community to ask him to retrieve his campaigns signs which had been planted throughout Durham.

It was a dismissive affront to Durham’s identity but it was also confusing voters in our own elections.

He was a jerk about it.  But after I firmly, but respectfully, refuted his hegemonic misperception that Durham was somehow “his” suburb anyway, he finally had the signs retrieved.

All too often, I found myself also having to disavow non-residents who owned businesses here of this arrogant notion.

The story is often repeated that before Durham formed an organization to advocate for its identity, assets, virtues and sense of place, it was considered the “red-headed step child of the region.”

Hearing this old saw, many, including members of the local media, often mistake that Durham considered itself that way.

But community pride levels here even back then were off the charts, many times higher than this metric in other communities, especially those nearby, pretention to the contrary not withstanding.

There is a huge difference between “feeling” like a red-headed step-child and being “treated like one.”  Residents of Durham were always mystified when a news editorial or non-resident speaker would lecture Durham to feel better about itself.

Any here holding that misperception tended to be non-residents working in Durham, upon whom the distinction was lost.

Many of these commuters love Durham and treat it as they do their homes located elsewhere.  But many don’t which leads to several downsides.  Here are several:

• Those who don’t like Durham perpetuate myths to visitors, especially the vast majority of relocating executives and newcomers who mystery shop the community as visitors first.

 

• They also have a lot to say, often giving local news media and even local officials a distorted impression of how Durham residents feel about issues.

 

• They often dominate boards of advocacy organizations which weigh in on Durham issues without revealing that their perceptions are contaminated.

 

• As respectful as these commuters may be, just as visitors can be, they are more prone to litter, especially if pretentious or condescending toward Durham.

 

• They also can’t help but be less passionate about Durham’s sense of place, often among the first to complain about developments needing to respect Durham’s culture by preserving groves or meeting historic preservation reviews.

 

• Those who own businesses here seem dismissive of the importance of hiring locally, respecting Durham values and using Durham vendors and populating developments with locally-owned independent stores.

 

• If not persuaded that when addressing questions from visitors or potential newcomers about Durham, the question is about Durham, not where they happen to live, non-residents working but not living here can wreak immense economic harm.

All of this is to say that local officials and news media must be extremely careful when addressing concerns raised by potential developments, even when fronted or given voices by so-called Durham organizations or businesses.

For a community to retain its sense of identity and place, it is important for local officials and the news media to give special weight to those who are Durham through and through.

As a friend of mine who is a researcher and author for the Urban Land Institute is fond of saying during presentations he gives across the country -

“Place is more than just a location or a spot on a map. A sense of place is a unique collection of qualities and characteristics – visual, cultural, social, and environmental – that provides meaning to a location.

Sense of place is what makes one location (e.g., your hometown) different from another location (e.g., my hometown), but sense of place is also that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about.”

He ends each presentation by asking a question:

“Do you want new development to shape the character of your community?”

Or

“Do you want the character of your community to shape new development?”

As Wendell Berry once wrote, “It all turns on affection.”

Affection for Durham is not a requirement for running for elected office in Durham.  In my time here, I’ve known a couple who had self-loathing instead.

But most love this community deeply.  They should just be very careful who they listen to and take their lead from those whom Berry calls “stickers,” especially when being overrun by “boomers.”

As cultural anthropologist Dr. Grant McCracken advises brands across the globe (emphasis mine):

“…don’t come in and colonize the space, sort of occupy it and honor what was there before and…draw cultural meanings out of it into your brand….which will be richer, and more interesting for the connection.”