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Say What? And to Whom?
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Business New Haven
6/12/2000
By: BNH
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Baltimore freelance writer Susan L. Hartt just got an $80,000-a-year job marketing New Haven (which is a pretty nice piece of change for a freelance writer. We know).
More power to her. We've been shouting from the rooftops about marketing New Haven for seven years, and now perhaps something will actually get done.
But first, those in charge (City Hall, Yale, the Regional Leadership Council, which collectively are paying Hartt's salary) must figure out how to answer two key questions: What is the message we want to broadcast about New Haven? And, who do we want to hear it?
Recent history amply demonstrates that the slogan-by-committee approach ("City Lights, New England Sights"), which seeks to devise something that will offend no one, invariably produces work that attracts no one, either.
Instructive, too, is the state's experience with the "You Belong in CT" campaign that sought to stanch the net out-migration of teenagers from Connecticut. That expensive effort produced a Web site (www.youbelonginCT.com) that was so obviously produced by middle-aged, middle-class men that any 18-year-old would have considered it a parody of wannabe hipness.
Plainly, the message needs to be that New Haven is the state's cool city, the place with the most things for youngish people to do - culture, cuisine, creative people doing new and interesting things.
Who do we want to absorb this message. Again, recent experience suggests that the target audience is closer than we think.
Case in point: A commercial Realtor recently told us about his attempts to get a fast-growing suburban software company to relocate to a newly refurbished downtown New Haven office building, of which they would occupy three stories. The CEO and senior managers were enthusiastically in favor of the move.
As the lease was being drafted, management decided to ask for staff input about the relocation. The company's employees, it turned out, wanted no part of downtown New Haven. For now, the company remains in its inner-ring suburb, exploring new relocation options.
There, then, is the audience: regular, working people who vote with their feet. They can choose to work in Shelton; they can choose to work in Branford. They might choose to work in New Haven. But first New Haven has to sell them - not only on its restaurants, galleries and boutiques - but also on its cleanliness, its safety and its parking.
New Haven needs to make them feel as though they won't be middle-class pioneers in a sea of chaos and poor people - that they won't be alone and afraid in a hostile environment.
Moreover, the target market is not just young, professional people who might work here; it's those who already do. The world headquarters of the Knights of Columbus employs hundreds of workers in its signature 22-story tower at Church and George streets right off the Route 34 connector. For most of them, the downtown New Haven experience is a hermetically sealed one confined to the few steps from the parking garage to the K of C entrance. Efforts such as the concerts and food fests staged during warmer months by the Town Green Special Services District were designed to lure such workers three blocks north to the Green during lunchtime. From our vantage point just across the street, it is evident that very few of them do.
So that, too, is the target audience. They're already here, or at least nearby. But they need to be sold.
There's an old saying: Selling begins at "no." New Haven is at "no." Time to get selling.
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