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Marketing
Team Set to ‘Brand’ Tribeca by Carl Glassman It’s not a tube of toothpaste, a can of soda, or a flashy new sports car. But in the eyes of some local marketers, Tribeca is ready to be sold. And now, after nearly a year of convening focus groups, assembling research, and dreaming up schemes to draw visitors to the neighborhood, they think they’ve got the pitch. Backed by a $200,000 grant from New York’s Empire State Development Corp. and $150,000 from the September 11th Fund given for “technical assistance” to Lower Manhattan small businesses, these marketing researchers and idea people are out to “brand” Tribeca. “Branding” is the term marketers use for the creation of a product image. The Tribeca Organization, a group formed after the terrorist attacks to revive local businesses, is borrowing conventional branding practices from the corporate world and putting them to the test in Tribeca, hoping to bring foot traffic into the neighborhood and bolster flagging commerce. The effort is led by three T.O. members: Roland Gebhardt, a product and graphic designer, and marketing consultants Richard Corman and Gabrielle Bradford . “We went into this trying to understand Tribeca and what its strengths are that we could characterize in a series of ideas and communications,” said Corman. “We wanted to find the attitudes and spirit of Tribeca that could drive economic benefit to the business community and strengthen the whole neighborhood.”
The group hired Ed Wolf, a market researcher who plies his trade with the likes of ESPN, AT&T and Chicklets, to get to the bottom of what people think of the neighborhood. “We look at Tribeca as a package good as we’d look at a box of soap or a can of soup or a package of chewing gum,” Wolf said. IF TRIBECA WERE A CAR… For starters, Corman and Gebhardt rounded up what they called “sages”—community board members, business owners and others with deep community roots. In January the group sat around a table as Wolf peppered them with questions such as, “If Tribeca were a car, what car would it be?” “He wanted bullet points, distilled notions of what our neighborhood is,” recalled Bruce Ehrmann, a longtime Tribeca resident and Community Board 1 member. Ehrmann, like some others in the group, found the approach overly simplistic. “I know what I love about Tribeca but it would be hard to reduce it to three bullet points,” he said.” Nevertheless, Wolf, who received $42,000 for his services, used the information from that meeting to conduct interviews with three focus groups—workers, residents, and people who had visited the neighborhood. He wanted to know their impressions of Tribeca, good and bad. Participants described the neighborhood as quirky, eclectic, unique, serene and safe. They also called it inaccesable, stuck up and aloof. One visitor said that Tribeca is “full of people wearing trench coats and expensive shoes.”
Imagination, which so far has been paid $37,000 for its efforts (about one-third their going rate, they say) next came up with “filter words” for Tribeca. In the advertising trade, filter words are meant to appear consistently in all promotions of a product. TRIBECA GETS ITS VERY OWN WORDS Imagination determined that these will be Tribeca’s filter words: Authentic, Human, Eclectic, Engaging, Vital, and Evolving. The team then devised a list of many more words that they associated with Tribeca. It decided that there would be no logo for the neighborhood and no slogan either. Instead, it settled on the idea of using various three-word combinations, preceded by the word Tribeca. This promotional device will be available to any Tribeca business or organization wanting to use it to promote themselves or an event. Here are three examples, as created by Imagination’s content director, Eduardo Braniff. TriBeCa TriBeCa TriBeCa Splash eat look Swoosh talk ahh! Thwak see woof Corman explained that the word sets are an “identity vehicle” that “affords creativity and flexibility but all within the mindset and the overall imagery of Tribeca.” Gebhardt called the concept “playful, literary and challenging.” “This is not a go-out-there-and-hit-them-over-the-head program,” he said. “Tribeca is a different kind of neighborhood.” SLURP, SIP, SPILL, ETC. With the three-word motif in mind, Imagination came up with some neighborhood events. The most important thing about these events, said Leslie Wellot, the company’s main planner on the project, is that they must “feel” like Tribeca. Following are some of the events that Imagination invented, as described in a presentation the company gave last month: “Slurp, Sip, Spill”: In January, a communal table is placed on West Broadway and people buy tickets to sample bread and soup from various local restaurants. The restaurants use “interesting spices” that “draw upon Tribeca’s rich spice history and warm visitors up.” Visitors vote on the best soup. “Toast, View, Chill”: A five-hour, seven bar pub crawl “to introduce visitors to the bar scene in Tribeca.” “1 Lump, 2 Lump, 3 Lump”: A “residents only” community tea party in which Washington Market Park is filled with a “sea of tables and chairs set up for teas and cookies from local restaurants and bakeries.” “Chow, Screen, Chat”: Playing off the “excitement and buzz” of the May Tribeca Film Festival, this screening program in June would feature movies made in Tribeca or by Tribeca filmmakers. The films would be shown in stores, restaurants, schools and “unique outdoor locations” such as the Holland Tunnel ventilation tower. “Float, Frolic and Fly”: “Inflatable structures,” anchored to buildings on opposite sides of the street form canopies between the buildings. “Underneath the inflatables, visitors will find a compelling story about Tribeca—its architecture, citizens, history or future.” “Seek, Peek, Find”: A scavenger hunt designed to “invite visitors to appreciate the neighborhood, learn about the buildings.” A “local celebrity” would kick off the event. Shop, Sip, Skate: A skating rink is placed in Washington Market Park. Outside the park, “local artists and craftspeople,” as well as merchants, sell their goods. Hoping to launch “Shop, Sip, Skate” for the coming holiday season, the Tribeca Organization’s Corman and Imagination’s Leslie Wellot and Lisa Davies appeared last month before the Washington Market Park’s Board of Directors, seeking approval to put a temporary, 60- by 68-foot rink in the park, a project that Imagination would produce. “It’s not nasty crass stuff,” Davies reassured the board, which has reserved judgement on the rink. At the meeting Davies said she did not know what the rink would cost. But later, as the Tribeca Organization would learn, Imagination wanted $300,000 to produce it, too much to raise in time for the holidays. Corman said he hopes to do a scaled-down event in December, but he has hopes of getting corporate sponsorship for the rink in February. Corman and Gebhardt said they want to raise the money for the rink and the other events—an estimated $700,000—through corporate sponsorship or possibly a grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. Eventually they see support coming from within the community BRINGING THE TRAFFIC As part of their marketing plan, Corman and Gebhardt hired Kathleen Wyer Lane, a public relations consultant, who said she intends to pitch story ideas on Tribeca to many publications, especially overseas. Lane said she wants to draw people to the neighborhood who have an “artistic bent, like to eat, like to explore new neighborhoods, and like to say they were in Tribeca.” “I’m not going to have people in wearable art running around here with lots of gold chains and stone-washed jeans,” she said. Last month, Imagination presented the results of their work to three of the community “sages” they had first met in January. Following a lengthy Power Point presentation on communication objectives, positioning statements, filter words, and aliterative titled events, Imagination received kind words for some of its ideas, but a cooler reaction to the notion of marketing the neighborhood. As Oliver Allen, a long-time Hudson Street resident and the Trib’s writer on Tribeca history put it, “People are perfectly happy to not have people come around.” Former Councilwoman Kathryn Freed said that having watched Soho “flip” into a commercial neighborhood in less than three years, she didn’t want that for Tribeca. “Businesses and residents collide on some things,” Freed said. “Soho became too successful.” Corman acknowledged the fine line between the healthy foot traffic that local businesses crave and an incursion into the quiet that residents treasure. “Clearly that has been an issue from day one, and there is no simple answer,” he said. “But it’s a long time,” Corman added, “between now and that kind of success.” |
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