Rick Bean

It is both inspiring and more than a bit humbling to see someone like Rick Bean so quickly and significantly embrace and deploy Durham’s overarching brand. Not just because he is head of a major employer in our community or that he is a relative newcomer to Durham or even that he publishes the hometown newspaper.

For those unfamiliar with the term, the easiest way for me to describe an “overarching” community brand is that it captures the distinctive character and personality of an entire community with a unifying framework and a consistent and compelling voice.

I’m impressed because Rick took his time getting to know Durham before jumping in…but jump in he did recently when he announced and launched a year-long series of weekly full page displays themed around the overarching Durham brand launched about 2 ½ years ago after being distilled through a rigorous community-wide process that took nearly that same time span.

Of course, he isn’t the first to embrace the overarching community brand, nor is this the first time the paper has embraced it. It has even percolated in stories and editorials which is a good sign it is organic and resonates with Durhamites.

In fact, as the research predicted, it has already been embraced by nearly 400 organizations and businesses and as of a year ago had already achieved nearly 80% awareness and 97% favorability among residents.

After his year of observation, Rick decided to illustrate the community brand because he readily witnessed its resonance and…he’s an astute businessman.

What Rick is doing will demonstrate to even the most hesitant among us, that organizations can embrace this consistent and compelling way or articulating Durham without surrendering one ounce of corporate identity or individuality.

He could have just used the paper’s corporate identity to signal the campaign but he insisted on putting DCVB’s logo at the bottom, next to his own. DCVB is Durham’s marketing agency and obviously that means aggressively deploying the brand. But he is also astutely putting the signatures of two key advocacy groups along side, Downtown Durham Inc. and the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce.

Rick is proof that you only have to be in Durham a short time to see how well Durham’s brand reflects the community’s personality and character.

Durham truly is where great things happen!

Recovery by 2014

It appears from projections that domestic visitor person-trips won’t claw back to ’06 and ’07 levels until 2014 according to projections by DK Shifflet and IHS Global Insight.

That doesn’t mean recovery won’t begin as early as 2010. It just means it will take that long to rehydrate. And even when the number of “bodies” increases, it will take revenues--which have a delayed supply and demand reaction--much longer to reach and surpass their earlier levels. Most of the recovery will be leisure driven. It may take much longer--if at all--for business travel including conventions to recover.

Durham visitation has fallen harder than most because Durham draws a much higher proportion of travelers via air than other more "rubber-tire" destination areas either nearby or in other parts of the state. That means our visitor-related indicators are more robust, often by double digits over say Raleigh-Cary NC or Greensboro-High Point.

But the higher you go, the further and faster you fall when things decelerate as Durham learned in 2001, even prior to 9/11 and now during this downturn.

Durham needs to do everything it can to accelerate the recovery. City and County budgets depend on visitors now for $40+ million to help fund everything from education and services to police and fire protection. This year just the room occupancy tax alone will be down $1 million.

Unfortunately, just when DCVB needed to be at its most vigorous, we had to begin cutting back on expenses as early as November. We’re down as well in staff resources by 30%. But that’s the down side of self-funding visitor promotion with a tax on visitors.

The good news…the decline has bottomed…still spongy and hasn’t started back up but it has bottomed.

Miscues A Result of Misuse of the Airport Name

Business Week is the latest victim of indiscriminate use of the airport name as the name of a place.

By perpetuating the myth that RTP is located “between Durham and Raleigh”, it ends up being nowhere, e.g. “located “outside Raleigh-Durham, NC” as it was in an otherwise insightful article by Peter Engardio. In fact there is no such place as Raleigh-Durham.

And RTP has never been located between Durham and Raleigh. A retired RTP official told me that purposeful “mis-positioning” was originally hatched by the Raleigh Chamber several decades ago when he worked there as a way to distract relocating executives from the true location.

But as happens with these things, instead of rectifying it when discovered, the duped often try to restructure reality to safe face. And Durham may have been much too deferential and polite.

Indeed, RTP is mid-way between Atlanta and Philadelphia or Boston and Miami or Greensboro and Wilson. But it isn’t midway between Raleigh and Durham.

RTP’s actual physical location is Durham NC, four miles from Downtown, encompassed on three sides by the City in a special Durham County District. There is a small portion that spills over into Wake County near Morrisville. If the Park has to be midway between two points, it is in Durham, close to midway between Raleigh and Chapel Hill or more accurately Cary and Chapel Hill.

It is time to humble ourselves and take some advice from branding experts and refrain from ever misusing or permitting misuse of Raleigh-Durham as anything other than the name of the airport.

But is also long overdue for other parts of this family of communities, to “accept” the fact that Durham is the primary location of RTP or to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, they risk being increasingly viewed as small man in a toupe who thinks he’s Tom Cruise and makes you want to say “Stop That!”

To recognize the true location doesn’t require a mea culpa…every community in a 100 mile radius has benefited from RTP…now let’s just give it a home.

List Checkers

I affectionately refer to people whose work style or collaboration culture has little patience for discussion of concepts or process. They want to move immediately to alignment on key action items. That makes them pretty good at executing tactical things but more often than not, they rush off without any process or strategy in mind.

We’re all list checkers in the end; we just get to that point using very different styles. List checkers to me are people who use it as a dominant style. And there is nothing wrong with list checking; especially when you’re working alone and your actions don’t impact others. You can spot these individuals in a group because they tend to rush through discussions and have little patience for questions or alignment.

While I do my share of list checking, I come from a dominant style that tends to frame things in ideas, so I frame proposals in concepts. Then when aligned is achieved, for me the process and key actions seem easy and derivative. Makes me pretty fair at strategy, consistency and finding win/wins, but for a list checkers I’ve learned it is pure torture to have me in the discussion.

I can--and do--work with a lot of list checkers but I’ve seen the damage that results when list checking dominates or bullies a discussion prior to alignment on concepts and process.

• Too often, it results in actions that are unfair or imbalanced because they don’t take into account whether they are equitable, consistent or justifiable.
  

• Too often it leads to fragmented, “little picture” achievements that don’t add up to any coherent strategy.
  
  
• And it ultimately leads to not "listening” which often turns the discussion at hand into the politics of push and shove vs. collaboration. Oh there are achievements for sure, but at what cost?
  

But while most concept and process people can easily move to tasks, more often than not, list checkers find concept and process inscrutable. That’s probably why they are impatient. They don’t seem to know how or aren’t willing to ask the questions or clarifications important for alignment. Or worse, they don’t have any justification other than pure opinion.

Communities have dominant styles as a part of their brand. Durham’s dominant style is to work through concepts and processes because it tries to be fair and equitable. Often that means people need to be flexible about the end result and trust it can be win/win. But we also have our share of impatient list checkers who I’m sure feel frustrated and irritated at the dialogue necessary for alignment. They are also dismayed when ramming things through isn’t appreciated, regardless of the outcome.

Fast & Loose with Metro Areas

The inherent cultural differences between Durham and Raleigh can be seen in how respective news media located in these two respective metro areas depict them.

Raleigh is in the three-county Raleigh-Cary MSA, but the media over there often appears to ignore that and for some reason drops Cary.

They are probably some of the people who say that “everyone” calls it Raleigh. But if they could see some of the research on that point that I’ve seen over the years, they would realize it is obnoxious to most.

This is also an excellent example of why any branding expert will tell you being on the back end of a hyphen is the first step to being invisible.

On the other hand, the four-county Durham, NC MSA, which includes Chapel Hill, was not assigned a hyphenated designation by the Census - but the news media here often modifies the designation and adds a hyphen anyway.

Interesting juxtaposition. One very exclusive. The other inclusive.