Cape Girardeau Branded Wayfinding Program

Some things are just meant to be together. Remember the ad where two people collide, "Hey! You got your peanut butter in my chocolate. Well, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter." Voila, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were born. Two great tastes that taste great together (some would say, even better!).

It's the same with branding and wayfinding; both initiatives are stronger when they are bundled into a single powerful program. Branding is all about leaving your consumer with a memorable, relevant, unified impression of your community. Wayfinding is one of the most high-profile, critical mediums for delivering that impression.

So we at North Star Destination Strategies were thinking, "why leave it to a chance collision?" As such, North Star has partnered with AECOM Wayfinding Studio, based in Orlando, Florida and backed by a parent company network of 65,000 employees nationwide. The goal is to offer a more cost-effective, integrated approach to branded wayfinding. Quite literally, brands that move people.

"I had a real light bulb moment recently," explains Don McEachern, CEO of North Star "North Star client Cape Girardeau showed me the new wayfinding program based on their destination brand. The brand elevated the signage. And the signage - as a beautiful physical incarnation - elevated the brand. I realized that by bundling the two products we can eliminate redundant research costs, focus the branding effort, collaborate on the end product and save communities money.

"Traditionally, branding and wayfinding have been approached separately . . . often the charge of different departments. This can result in wayfinding that is not branded. Or a branding effort that is retrofitted to a wayfinding effort. Or a wayfinding effort that's put on hold when the community discovers it has no brand to guide the design. In all cases, it means greater costs and a less effective end product."

North Star chose AECOM in part because of the impressive work the company had done with the Cape Girardeau brand. The destination's brand platform is based on the historical stories and lore that flow from the mighty Mississippi. But with very little actual product, the challenge was how to use stories to sell the city. Leaders devoted themselves to building tourism product that supports the brand essence. One of the linchpins of this development . . . branded wayfinding.

"Our charge was not just to design signage in the brand's color palette," says Jonathan Mugmon, SEGD, AECOM Wayfinding Studio Leader. "Our charge was to infuse the signage with the passion, purpose and graphic appeal of the brand. As with everything else in the community, they wanted their wayfinding to tell a story. This was particularly true with the entryway signage, which North Star had recommended they elevate to the level of public art . . . a philosophy with which we wholly agree."

Healing Urban Scars

A casual stroll in most downtowns these days will likely find you staring straight into large plots of incomplete developments. With the economic downturn and tight financing, it’s no wonder that developers are finding it hard to see a project to completion. Unfortunately, if you thrive on the energy so often synonymous with downtowns these urban scars are major hitches in your mood.

At North Star Destination Strategies, many of our clients are faced with the same conundrum…what to do with the blight, vacant lots and wishful development. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times, detailed the many efforts that various organizations are doing to remedy the negative impacts these delayed projects are creating. One such method described in the article is creating temporary, usable open space for patrons of downtowns to interact with each other. Perhaps the greatest benefit to creating temporary parks in these areas is the positive perception that it brings to the community.

Blight denigrates your reputation and since community branding is essentially the business of managing that reputation, one tactic we often recommend is a straightforward approach to control and repackage these areas. In the case of Downtown New Orleans, we recommended the use of large-format branded canvases to drape on the side of vacant buildings, drawing attention to the opportunity for redevelopment. Or in Helena, AR infrastructure could easily be transformed through the use of branded window clings, or a fresh coat of paint (in the brand color palette, of course). In Brookings, SD a construction site gets a facelift with branded signage along the chain link fence.

These tactics in conjunction with larger destination marketing initiatives have proven to be successful at creating positive brand perceptions. Given that it is unlikely we will see vast improvements in the economy in recent months, caring for the symptoms of the problem, urban scars, could be a viable, temporary remedy moving forward. Not only is this a perfect opportunity to engage the community, it will likely have lasting benefits for the foreseeable future.

~ Adam

Just Add Water

They say that inspiration strikes when you least expect it. Or maybe that’s lightning. Inspiration comes when you least expect it. Whatever the saying, the North Star Destination Strategies team is always looking for unexpected places to help ease our inspiration along.

The entire North Star team comes together several times for each of our community branding clients . . . the debrief, the strategy presentation and development of what we call brand action ideas. These are a series of strategic building block ideas customized to bring each client’s brand strategy to life in every corner of the community. Some are foundational, some are functional and some are pure fun. All take a lot of imagination.

We include the whole team in these meetings because when our many diverse talents come together, the real magic begins!

Recently, we took all that talent and put it out on a boat in the middle of a lake for a water-based brand action idea meeting. And ya know what . . . we discovered that ideas flow even better on a boat. As an added bonus…it’s just plain funny to see your boss teetering a little as he talks, bracing himself against a stormy lake’s rocking swells.

The North Star team had been counting down the minutes until our Lake Day for weeks . . . idea generation out on the water under cloudless blue skies. But when the dark clouds rolled in early the morning of the big day, a few worried looks were exchanged. Seriously, it hadn’t rained for weeks. Not to worry. Our much anticipated plan was set in branding stone and we were determined. Even I, who has been known to get a little sea sick, wouldn’t dare to be the first to suggest a rain check.

Switch scene.

The rain is coming down, making the surface of the water dance like popcorn. The first randomly selected team is performing their ideas (We find that ideas are better communicated and more entertaining when acted out, sung or drawn. I told you, diverse talents.) Don and Ed are coaxing the pooling water off the covering above our heads, and the rest of us huddle under its limited surface area. It was, quite literally, brainstorming!

Ahhh…yes. I don’t think we could have beaten the heat any more effectively than that. Rain or shine, we always strive to go a little above and beyond. Even the highest performing teams should be able to get out of the confines and enjoy a taste of summer. The North Star team really drank up this opportunity—so much so that we were all a bit waterlogged by the end of the day.

Does your team have any traditions or ways to switch up the usual routine? Does a change of environment result in stronger ideas?

~ Erin

The Savory Essence of Goshen

North Star Destination Strategies staffers are experts at community research. In fact, one of my favorite things about going on a BrandPrint in-market trip is the research we conduct for our new community clients. In-markets are full of interviews, focus groups, tours, presentations, and in-depth conversations. But sometimes the most fulfilling and interesting interactions happen when you least expect them. That is . . . if your branding antennae are tuned in to the nuances of the place.

On a recent in-market trip to Goshen, Indiana I had one such research revelation at a local downtown eatery called Kelly Jae’s. Award-winning chef Kelly Graf delighted us with an amazing tapas meal complete with the most delicious dessert, while her business partner Karen Kennedy served us with humility, comedy and ingenuity. With a blanket of snow falling outside, Kelly and Karen’s warmth and generosity during our meal did not go unnoticed.

Sometimes it’s easier for me to find an experience, an activity or an interview that embodies the community I am visiting. Our dinner affair at Kelly Jae’s did just that.

As we entered the comforting dining room we were greeted with a welcoming stroll to our table, weaving between tables full of laughter and interesting conversation. The same can be said as you enter the cozy streets of Goshen; children laughing and playing as the little ones exit from their classrooms in a frenzy to get to the playground. Diversity is a major tenet of the community that gives the area a uniqueness all its own; and as we sat and pondered our delectable entrée we were faced with the assortment and fusion of the tapas menu. Our food arrived and Kelly’s placement of a chive or drizzle of lemon butter was symbolic of the carefully crafted downtown that Goshen has worked hard to create. As our meal progressed, the tapas menu was a catalyst for interaction with Karen and my colleagues. And as we departed from the restaurant and eventually Goshen, we left encouraged, fulfilled and inspired. WHAT a pleasurable way to gain insight.

I couldn’t help but think how North Star’s research discovered the essence of this place. Our assortment of surveys, interviews, consumer research, and perception studies is an excellent recipe for discovering the subliminal and using the personality of a place to put a community’s best branding foot forward.

Perhaps you should visit Goshen and make a special, enlightened trip to Kelly Jae’s. You won’t be sorry! And you might even get the feeling that you are better for the effort.

What experience in your community best embodies its essence?

~ Adam

Tourism Research Talk at TTRA

Here at North Star Destination Strategies, we like to do visitor research. But we especially like to do research that our clients can afford. I mean really, what’s the point otherwise? We’ve learned a few things over the years about how to cut costs for great research without sacrificing quality, and I was lucky enough to be able to talk about our techniques to an academic audience at the Travel and Tourism Research Association Conference in London, Ontario earlier this summer.

Now, if you don’t know the TTRA, it’s an international organization of the best and brightest tourism researchers in the world. They do things right. The only thing is, doing things “right” according to academic theory—unbiased, random, representative, and super-tight—automatically means a price point in the tens of thousands of dollars, and often more. I don’t know about your organization, but my clients would laugh at me if I told them I needed $80,000 to deliver a visitor survey. We think DMOs of small to mid-sized communities deserve to know about their visitors, too. So we’ve come up with an approach that works with their resources and within their budgets.

Before the advent of the internet and cell phones, consumer and market research was relatively straightforward and simple. From the beginning of market research in the 1920s to around the 1990s, random samples were achieved by mailed surveys and random digit dialing telephone surveys. Now, with cell phones, do-not-call lists, and the fact that at least 25% of the population doesn’t even have a landline phone, a phone list for surveying is no longer considered random. Most of us still have a mailing address, but few people will actually take the time to complete and send back a mailed survey. This presents a problem called non-response bias . . . which scientific researchers don’t like. A guy named Dillman figured out a pretty accepted method to increase the response rate to mailed surveys back in 1986, but since it involves no less than four separate mailings to each randomly selected household, only the flushest of budgets have the luxury of using it.

In compromise, and because we believe we can get awfully close to true representation by doing what we do, we take a multi-modal approach to community marketing research. All of North Star’s quantitative visitor surveys have an online foundation, because with 90% of US consumers using e-mail and 80% of them regularly active on the internet, we find better representation by driving traffic in different ways to a survey link—thus the fancy word “multi-modal”. Online surveys are virtually free to distribute (and it doesn’t get much cheaper than that). That way we can focus on doing what we do best—translating the data into meaning, providing relevant and important implications, and making recommendations for destination marketing organizations.

Have you ever wanted to do community marketing research, visitor research or tourism research but thought you couldn’t afford it? At North Star we say: think again.

~ Shannon

A Lighthearted Approach to Civic Input

We often hear community leaders facing the issue of difficulty in receiving feedback from their residents, businesses and visitors. Candy Chang, public installation artist, designer, urban planner and TED Fellow, has come up with an ingenious method of gathering impromptu perceptions on the spot. Urban neighborhoods are sometime plagued with blight or vacancies. Chang has created a way to capture the spontaneous conversation often encouraged by the sight of such vacancies and catapulted it onto the sides of buildings, windows and doors. The program’s name “I Wish This Was”, and soon thereafter “Neighborland”, uses vinyl stickers strategically placed throughout an urban neighborhood to entice residents and passersby to comment on their wishes for the decaying façade or vacant storefront. The program is wildly successful in New Orleans.

But sometimes it is easy to forget that the real gem behind this program is civic input and a catalyst for change and not the bright red stickers. We are in the business of branding communities across the nation. A similar lighthearted method for receiving community input, in the spirit of the community’s brand, might have profound results not only for the brand but for the community that adopted it. What programs are currently in the works in your community that could take a lesson from Chang’s fun approach?

~ Adam

Community Brand Action Ideas from $1 - $300,000

Most communities don’t expect enough of their community brands. Far too often we see community branding projects that are considered complete when a new logo and/or tagline is incorporated into their website and stationery. Our message to these communities – and to you if you’re considering community or destination branding – is DON’T SETTLE! Branding that stops at the superficial application of a logo and line is like a smile that stops before it reaches the eyes. Nice enough at first glance, but lacking warmth and authenticity on closer inspection.

But many communities feel they don’t have the resources for true brand integration and some ideas can be expensive. For example, entryway signage is an excellent, very high profile medium for reflecting your community’s singular strength. Obviously, that’s an investment. Another example; when New Orleans started implementing its downtown/creative class recruitment brand it received a $300,000 grant to implement a one-way ticket program, a unique initiative for bringing the most qualified creative class citizens to the city for an entrepreneurial test run.

The good news: brand action doesn’t have to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are lots of ways to integrate your brand messaging that don’t cost a dime (okay, maybe one dime). For example North Star always recommends that the brand manager convene a group of public and private sector professionals dedicated to the marketing of their community. During the initial meetings this group should accomplish several tasks including:

• Compilation of a master list of existing activities and events. These activities might include festivals, young professionals or women’s programs, community-wide wellness programs, youth groups, resident recruitment groups, green programs such as recycling, entrepreneurial or small business training, etc. Which of these events support the strategic brand platform that defines your community? How can you integrate the brand’s graphic identity and messaging into those events? Through co-marketing? Renaming the event? Developing new activities that support the brand platform? By slightly refocusing the marketing and content of existing successful activities you significantly further your brand strategy for little more money than you would have spent on the events anyway. This was one of the first steps taken by Columbus, Indiana when implementing its community-wide brand.
  
  The Columbus, IN CVB created a new Face Book group: “Unforgettable Women” to market to female travelers http://www.facebook.com/UnforgettableWomen

• Compilation of a master list of consumer touchpoints. Within your community there are thousands of consumer touchpoints . . . places or situations where the consumer interacts with the city. Every single touchpoint represents an opportunity to make an impression. Examples of touchpoints include phone greetings and messages, government stationery, bill stuffers, wayfinding, proposals, city vehicles, employee uniforms, Little League scoreboards and fields, your website, the DMV, Visitors Guides, economic development recruitment pieces, etc. etc. Review your list of touchpoints during your first public sector brand team meeting. Divide the list into three categories: 1) Easy, do immediately; 2) Moderate difficulty, implement within the first year; 3) Difficult, revisit later (designate a time). McKinney, Texas has had a lot of branding success with an approach very similar to this.



• Review public sector home pages. For your first meeting, have each member of your marketing partnership bring print-outs of their company’s website homepage and the page that discusses the community in which the company is located. Discuss ways to integrate ideas and language that support the brand strategy into these pages. Use your brand narrative as a guide. How do the tenets of your brand strategy translate to a doctor’s work, to banking, teaching, real estate, etc? Ask each member to craft branded language that works with the spirit of your brand and incorporate it into their website home page. If a major corporation or organization is not in attendance at the meeting, go through this exercise for them. Just by threading your consistent brand message through the messages of all the major players in your community, you can establish a strong brand presence . . . absolutely free!
  
  In Shawnee, Kansas coffee shops can promote Good Mornings Start Here while Realtors can promote Good Living Starts Here.
  
  

So there you go. Brand action ideas whose price tags range from $1 to $300,000. Look around your community. What are some low cost ways to weave your brand messaging into the very fabric of your society?

~ Christi

Introducing Community Bones

Lovers of all things research, prepare yourselves. Scratch that. Lovers of all things interesting, prepare yourselves! North Star Destination Strategies is about to begin tweeting fascinating fact and relevant bits of info about community research using the hashtag #communitybones.

Community bones? Say what?

A little back story. I’m what they call a cultural anthropologist. Now, this never fails to elicit comments like “Anthropology? Isn’t that like Indiana Jones?” Or on a really bad day, “Anthropology? Isn’t that like studying dinosaurs?” To which I say something like, “Actually, Indiana Jones is an archaeologist. People who study dinosaurs are paleontologists. I’m a cultural anthropologist. I study the behaviors of living, breathing people.”

But one day last year, while preparing to speak at the Georgia Governor’s Conference on Tourism, my introducer was reading my bio and said, “Anthropology? Isn’t that like the show Bones?” And while technically, the crime-solving forensic anthropologist on that show studies the way dead people lived and died . . . the name totally stuck.

So I’ve been called Bones around the office and at conferences for a while now. It started out the “Bones of Tourism” because I was dubbed such at a tourism conference. But strictly speaking, tourists aren’t the only consumers of communities whose behavior I interpret. I also study residents, businesses, neighbors, influencers, leaders, educators . . . really, you name it; I study it. So we widened our scope from the Bones of Tourism to Community Bones. Not as catchy, but more accurate and YOU KNOW how important accuracy is to us researchers.

Now, there’s an inside joke that anthropologists with social skills become cultural anthropologists (because they have to talk to a lot of people) and those who are socially challenged become archaeologists or forensic anthropologists (because they don’t). I just want to make it clear that I definitely fall into the socially skilled category!

So again, because this stuff is super interesting and because I am socially skilled, you will definitely want to tune into North Star’s Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/#!/NorthStarIdeas and follow #communitybones to keep up with our cultural musings and information sharing on all things community research (and a few things not)!

~ Shannon Gray, Research Director, North Star Research

Now that’s the ticket!

The best things in life are free . . . and that includes a lot of the community brand action ideas we recommend for clients. But $300,000 will also buy you some pretty sweet brand integration.

We told you a few months ago about the brand North Star Destination Strategies developed for the New Orleans Downtown Development District. Well, it’s been less than a year and this dream client has nigh near implemented their entire strategic plan. We got a sneak peek at the progress they’ve made during an in-house presentation and it quite literally had us wiping tears of pure community branding joy from our eyes. One idea that really gave us goosebumps was the planned launch of NOLA's one-way ticket program. To welcome potential entrepreneurial transplants during next year’s Entrepreneurs Week, the DDD will send 100 one-way tickets to qualified entrepreneurs inviting them to come and sample a bit of the creative muse that is New Orleans.

So how does a downtown development group fund such a big-ticket initiative? How about through a $300,000 grant from the US Economic Development Administration? Congrats to the Big Easy DDD for making creativity look so . . . well . . . easy.

~ Christi