Redevelopment Resources – Blog

Redevelopment Resources is encouraging you to attend our upcoming half-day seminar, Tough Love and Downtown Revitalization, Tuesday June 14 in beautiful downtown Neenah. The event has been carefully crafted to meet your needs as a practitioner of economic development, community development and downtown revitalization. We are going to focus on issues facing your community in today’s economic environment, and what you can do to spur interest from developers, retailers, service related businesses and especially your elected officials.

Don’t miss the most helpful half-day session on downtown revitalization available! Learn from experienced practitioners, what you can do TODAY to start revitalizing your business district and other areas of your community. Sometimes it takes tough love to deal with a challenging city council, absentee or myopic property owners, and local business owners facing challenging times. Learn how to shift mindsets and incorporate transition.

Do you have vacant storefronts in your downtown? Do you have absentee landlords who don’t share your concern for the community? Do the business operators in your downtown need a spark of excitement? Learn techniques to exploit your assets and minimize your liabilities.

Attend “Tough Love and Downtown Revitalization” and learn how to approach business recruitment aggressively to fill your vacant storefront. You’ll hear approaches to dealing with blighted property that you can take back to your community and implement immediately. Discover how to be bold and deal with absentee property owners in an impactful way. Gain ideas for sparking enthusiasm and ownership in the downtown among small business owners.

If you cannot attend, send someone from your community. We will be announcing a very special giveaway at the event that you won’t want to miss! Visit our Events page on our web site and sign up today! Space is limited.

Internal marketing is defined as a management philosophy of promoting the community and its policies or goals to employees or other stakeholders as if they were customers. It is critical for change management and political support for any project or economic development/redevelopment effort. As an important implementation tool, internal marketing aids communications and helps to overcome any resistance to change. It informs and involves staff and other stakeholders on new projects, new initiatives and new thought processes.
The internal customers need to be marketed to just as external customers. In a community, internal marketing may pertain to municipal staff, other organizations’ staff members, elected officials, and private sector stakeholders. With any project or effort, supporters and detractors will exist. It is important to solidify the message and have other internal “customer” accept it so there will be support to the other internal stakeholders.

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There have been a number of articles and books published which address a company’s need to identify its competitive advantage. It’s not only important for companies, but it is also important for communities to develop and promote competitive advantages, as marketing plans are developed and businesses are courted. One definition of a sustained competitive advantage: “when a firm is implementing a value-creating strategy not simultaneously being implemented by any current or potential competitors and when these firms are unable to duplicate the benefits of this strategy”.
Similar to a competitive advantage is competitive positioning. You may not have a competitive advantage at all, but if you make a claim first, and loudest, your competitors have all they can do just to keep up. Although these concepts have been applied in the private sector, the ideas can also be easily transferred to the public sector. Your competitors are all the other communities hoping to lure the same new businesses away from your business park or downtown and to their doorstep.

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You’ve got to start marketing your community to attract business, right? It sounds easy. Advertise in some trade journals, go on a few marketing missions with the region or state, create a cool community logo and bam! Companies will be calling. Maybe the solution is a $50,000 branding campaign. Hire a marketing firm and they’ll come in and figure out your brand. Then you put your new logo on a few letters and THEN the companies will be calling.
What will you market? Most communities have charming downtowns, improved business/industrial parks, and available workforce. Most communities also have some incentives; a revolving loan fund, TIF districts, and possibly others to encourage and entice a company to locate within their community. But what sets your community apart from the others? It’s important to know the competitive advantages of the community, including local and regional assets, strengths and weaknesses, what types of companies already exist in the community and what makes them successful there.
Who will you send the letters to? Have you defined your target market? Is your potential audience reachable on a national level, are they international….or are they already in your very own backyard? If you’ve answered all of the above, that’s good, but then is the message going to be the same to all three groups? What are the needs of the target audiences? What will be appealing to them…. And do you have it already?

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I was traveling on an airplane last week and the gentleman sitting next to me told me he was in the steel industry. He had some reading to catch up on so I didn’t visit too much with him until closer to the end of the flight. He was reading several reports: “Construction Materials Outlook”, “Automotive Sector Outlook”, “Recovery Economics; Threats and Opportunities”. They sounded very interesting and before the end of the flight he asked me if I wanted them because he was going to recycle them.
So I took the reports. One never knows where some useful information may come from. I thought I’d read through them and then recycle them myself. Before I do, I’ll share the summary of what I read.

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