Case Study: Downtown Investment Marketing Strategy and Campaign Assets
Prince George is a small city (pop. 70,000) located close to the geographic center of British Columbia and is a hub for trade and transportation. Given its situation at the confluence of two rivers, it was first established as a trading post in the early 1800s. It is the largest city in Northern BC and until recently its economy was largely driven by forestry.
In recent years, their local forestry industry has slowed, leaving the city in a state of transition. Their economy is becoming more service focused, with major employers being health care providers, and educational institutions (public schools, a college, and a university). It is also home to light-industry, a brewery, some chemical plants, and is a staging center for mining exploration.
A municipally-owned corporation mandated to undertake programs designed to grow and diversify the local economy had assembled a task force of sorts to address a persistent problem found in the core of the city. Downtown Prince George had suffered from a lack of economic growth and vibrancy, resulting in general decay and vacant buildings.
Much like in many other mid-sized North American communities, the downtown shopping district had been abandoned by retailers. Large operations and box stores (e.g. WalMart, Home Depot, Costco) have established locations on the perimeter of the city, to take advantage of lower land costs. In doing so, they have taken retail traffic with them.
Alongside an urban planning team tasked with forming a development plan, smashLAB was brought in to produce a comprehensive marketing strategy that would enable City representatives to start new discussions about investment in the downtown.
During the first stage of the process, our partner team determined that the outreach strategy should be directed in a very narrow fashion. They felt strongly that the available resources would be best used by being aimed at property developers who actively investigate investment opportunities in communities like this.
With this knowledge in hand, our team started to contemplate the state-of-mind of the intended audience, and the most viable option for presenting what was in many respects a rather dismal story. It quickly became evident that in spite of what our client might like to hear, we had to embrace what we were really working with: a dilapidated, and somewhat abandoned block of land that felt a little like a ghost town.
It isn’t easy to present such notions to a group that feels passionately about an area; nevertheless, in doing so, we were able to get to some other, equally positive truths. These included the deep desire felt by residents for increased amenities, a diversifying population, a strong financial value for investors, and notably attractive incentives offered to developers by the city.
It would be easy to create a polished and rosy marketing package for a project like this. Our hunch, was that such nonsense would have done little to break through the cacophony arising from the many communities doing just that. So, instead we concentrated on the facts: telling the story in as “no nonsense” of a fashion as we could.
Where others were using bright, rich images of rollerbladers in the park, we documented the actual state of the area. While they were telling implausibly cheery stories, we asked real residents to share their likes and dislikes relating to the community. Similarly, instead of falling into marketing lingo, we concentrated on statistical data.
Due to past stumbles on previous efforts, a number of stakeholders were vocally opposed to the entire exercise. Upon presenting the finished assets, however, one of the individuals we feared to be most critical of the process (the owner of a property management group) pulled us aside. He simply smiled and said, “this... this I can use to sell the downtown.”