By Jodie Willobee
Promotion, Arts and Culture Specialist
Michigan Main Street Center
Michigan State Housing Development Authority

I was in a meeting recently where a person was desperately looking for feedback, almost to the point of demanding it, but never took a breath long enough to let anyone respond. The room quickly filled with the dreaded silence that was heard by everyone except the one talking. When you know someone isn’t really going to listen, why bother trying to be heard? From Communications 101, we all know this is when the danger occurs.

As it goes with most folks, generally they just want to be heard. Take a festival for example, how do you really know that people are enjoying themselves? And how do you know they are going to come back next year? Seems like people fall into a couple camps here – the small, loud camp that will tell you each and everything on their mind in brazen detail and the larger, quieter camp that will keep their comments to themselves, tell 15 people about the negative part of their experience, and not return next year.

That silence I described at the meeting I was at, it is everywhere. What if you actively went in search of it? Think of what you might learn by tapping into it?

Survey Says!
At your next festival, why not put a couple charismatic volunteers in the crowd – one in the heart of the action and the other on the outskirts – with a super quick survey that asks:

- How many times have you attended this festival?

- What would we need to do to get you to come back?

Simple. No more, no less. Imagine the information this could provide. Do you have a healthy mix of newcomers and seasoned festival attendees? What kinds of things are people looking for that you don’t have? And the giant bonus in this is that all who are asked will go away with a bit better feeling because you showed their thoughts mattered and you weren’t afraid to hear what they had to say. I believe they call this a, win-win.

Maybe the backside of every meeting agenda should have a survey similar to this ready and waiting, just in case another person tempts the fate of listening with their mouth open.

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By Joe Borgstrom, Director
Specialized Technical Assistance
& Revitalization Strategy Division
Michigan State Housing Development Authority

I’ve been reading a very interesting book recently entitled, Buy-ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom. (Support a downtown or locally-owned bookstore) I picked up the book because I am an advertising and marketing geek. What I’ve been reading is a stunning, and sometimes scary, look at how we are being marketed to without evening consciously knowing it. This new field is being called “neuro-marketing.”

Using thousands of brain scans, the book details numerous examples of how different industries are using this type of marketing to make you naturally “root” their brand and how they can leverage our basic needs and wants to belong into purchases. Here are two of the more intriguing (and abbreviated) examples:

- A comparison between Coca-cola and Ford’s sponsorship of American Idol: Coke uses product integration so you associate people reaching for their dreams, thus you want the contestants (and unconsciously Coke) to succeed. Meanwhile, Ford uses nearly the same amount of money on old fashioned 30 second commercials with minimal integration. The result? Much higher brand awareness and retention for Coke over Ford.

- At major stores in New York and Los Angeles, clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch hires models to hang out in front of their stores. This, combined with the dark lighting and loud music give their stores a club-like feel where beautiful people are found. You too can be one of them, if you just buy their stuff.

I'm not a psychologist or sociologist, but I do know what these two examples have in common: The Experience. And not just any experience, an emotional experience. Whether you are rooting for your favorite singer (and vicariously for yourself) or being a person in “the in-crowd,” our emotions play a big part in how we purchase. This particular book has the brain scans to prove it.

So what does this have to with downtowns? A lot. The debate over the ethics of type of research is just heating up. Regardless of how the data came about, I think this validates an approach, albeit a much less scientific one, many communities have been deploying through their Main Street programs for years: Create an emotional connection to our downtowns and their businesses.

Integrating our downtowns, and the businesses in them, into the daily lives of our residents through experiences like festivals and special events (it’s “the place to be”), exceptional customer service (treatment usually reserved for “special people”), or just the general sense of “this is my downtown” (belonging), all have pangs of “neuro-marketing.”

The only real difference, in my opinion, is our downtowns’ approach is authentic. Our retailers do not conduct brain scans on customers to find out excellent service makes someone feel special. To them, that’s just smart business. Our downtowns were not designed to make you recognize a brand. Though, one could argue the businesses, architecture, events, and organizational efforts work together to communicate a “brand” that is like nowhere else on earth.

When it comes to this new age of neuro-marketing, we don’t need brain scans to find out what people want. We’ve included them in the process. They volunteer to help make our downtowns better for everyone. We call it Main Street.

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By Kelly Larson
Michigan Main Street Architect
State Historic Preservation Office
Michigan Department of History, Arts and Libraries
 

The Secretary of Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation…. Sounds kinda scary, doesn’t it? Especially when you consider these Standards are a kind of Ten Commandments in the world of historic preservation. Well, if you are (or know of) a property owner who wants to make some changes to his/her building and doesn’t like the idea of someone else telling them what they can and can’t do to their private property, then yes, these Standards do SOUND scary. But the truth is, they aren’t. They are actually a very common sense approach to utilizing a historic building in an economical way but without reducing the building’s historic integrity.

So let’s break it down. First, the “Secretary of Interior’s” part simply refers to the fact that someone had to create these “Standards” in the first place. In this case, the someone is the head of the Department of the Interior that administers the National Park Service. The National Park Service needed Standards in order to review projects seeking federal historic tax credits. Without the Standards, there would be no basis for anybody deciding what kind of work would or would not have a detrimental impact on a historic building. Nowadays, the Standards are used not only by the National Park Service but every State Historic Preservation Office and Local Historic District Commission as THE BASIS for reviewing all projects within their purview.

As for “Rehabilitation”, well that’s the best part. The Standards define rehabilitation as “the act or process of making possible a compatible use for a property through repair, alterations, and additions while preserving those portions or features which convey its historical, cultural, or architectural values.” Meaning, necessary repairs and alterations to a building are okay as long as the overall historic value of the building is preserved and retained. To state it uber-simply, if a property owner is doing work to their building they shouldn’t make the building any less historic than when they started.

The ten Standards for Rehabilitation are listed below.

1. A property will be used as it was historically or be given a new use that requires minimal change to its distinctive materials, features, spaces, and spatial relationships.

2. The historic character of a property will be retained and preserved. The removal of distinctive materials or alteration of features, spaces, and spatial relationships that characterize a property will be avoided.

3. Each property will be recognized as a physical record of its time, place, and use. Changes that create a false sense of historical development, such as adding conjectural features or elements from other historic properties, will not be undertaken.

4. Changes to a property that have acquired historic significance in their own right will be retained and preserved.

5. Distinctive materials, features, finishes, and construction techniques or examples of craftsmanship that characterize a property will be preserved.

6. Deteriorated historic features will be repaired rather than replaced. Where the severity of deterioration requires replacement of a distinctive feature, the new feature will match the old in design, color, texture, and, where possible, materials. Replacement of missing features will be substantiated by documentary and physical evidence.

7. Chemical or physical treatments, if appropriate, will be undertaken using the gentlest means possible. Treatments that cause damage to historic materials will not be used.

8. Archaeological resources will be protected and preserved in place. If such resources must be disturbed, mitigation measures will be undertaken.

9. New additions, exterior alterations, or related new construction will not destroy historic materials, features, and spatial relationships that characterize the property. The new work will be differentiated from the old and will be compatible with the historic materials, features, size, scale and proportion, and massing to protect the integrity of the property and its environment.

10. New additions and adjacent or related new construction will be undertaken in such a manner that, if removed in the future, the essential form and integrity of the historic property and its environment would be unimpaired.

If you’re curious how these Standards apply to a specific type of project, the National Park Service has several an “Online Education” section on their website that includes web classes, case studies, and checklists. They even have an “Illustrated Guidelines for Rehabilitating Historic Buildings.”

So see, the Standards aren’t that scary after all.

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By Dace Koenigsknecht
Economic Restructuring Specialist
Michigan Main Street Center
Michigan State Housing Development Authority

Within the Economic Restructuring realm, there is plenty of conversation around business retention and recruitment. In this piece, I would like to briefly touch upon the home-grown option. We at the Center are hearing buzz on Main Streets across the state, primarily containing the following two words – business incubator. Everyone seems interested in having one, but what exactly is an incubator? I’ve done a little digging, and here’s the scoop from my perspective…

A business incubator is an environment, a form of mentorship, for selected small or start-up businesses that can benefit from lower rents and services provided by the incubator. These small business owners benefit from low rent, office help, counseling on business and financial plans, marketing, bookkeeping, sharing of office systems and equipment, and other services. An incubator is intended to provide a firm foundation for development of a new product, or service; enabling the cash-poor entrepreneur to expand from concept to market in a timely manner.

There is one clear undertone I wish to stress; an incubator is an active partnership between its management and their small-business clients. Incubators provide a plethora of client development opportunities: feasibility studies and entrance screenings for prospects; advisory boards and mentors; and professional coaching / instruction in business plans, marketing strategies, accounting, finance, personal selling skills, entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial development training programs and manuals. If there is no active participation in the development process, then the arrangement is merely a landlord with small-business tenants. To spin it more philosophically: a landlord gives a man a fish, whereas an incubator teaches him to fish.

The last factor that I see revolves around proximity; that within the community, and that within the incubator. Entrepreneurs are inherently risk-takers; seeking both support and camaraderie from their environment. Take that bright high school student that starts a business in his hometown, where the support of family and social history are strongest. Or, take that college kid and his buddies that start a company in their cozy dorm room, where risk in numbers is somehow more palatable. Just as the social history of a community can create a psychological net for a budding entrepreneur, so can the daily interactions with like-minded people within an incubator. It is the close proximity of these less formal relationships, versus the mentorship of the incubator itself, that offer valuable moral and spiritual support.

How about your downtown? Your historic commercial district already functions as an informal incubator, and I hope that it embraces that role. Each business owner is a risk-taker with the bruises and scars of knowledge that can be shared. The built-in proximity along Main Street creates camaraderie and ‘safety in numbers’ – if not in the wallet, at least in the psyche. It doesn’t require the owner of the white elephant to utter those two words, for any one with under-utilized space (i.e. upper floors) and a desire to teach can be an incubator that makes a difference.

We at the Center recognize the importance of the entrepreneur within our communities, and have teamed with MSU Extension to offer their Energizing Entrepreneurs training to our Selected-level communities. The next session occurs in May.

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