In what can only be described as an unusual grassroots effort, merchants in Golden banded together in late 2000 to ask the city council to give them less money.
Less money?
It’s true, according to Steve Glueck, Golden’s director of planning and development. He says that 130 merchants asked the city to stop giving them the 3 percent “vendor’s fee” they were being paid for collecting city sales taxes. Instead, they asked the city to put the money into a pot to market all the businesses in Golden’s historic downtown.
The $250,000 to $300,000 thus generated each year has been used since 2001 to fund Golden’s Community Marketing Program, a campaign that includes branding, image-building, and promotion of sales and special events.
The program is based on a “rising-tide-floats-all-boats” concept, says Glueck, who oversees the program. “The merchants see that if they pool their advertising money, it’s worth a lot more, and each individual retailer gets more impact.”
Molly Morrow of Cohn Marketing Group, which runs the Community Marketing Program under contract with the city, says the program began with a period of intensive planning that included information-gathering, focus groups and establishment of timelines and measurable objectives. That, in turn, led to development of Golden’s “Small Town, Big Fun” campaign, with placement of ads on prominent billboards, in major newspapers, and on signs on buses and at Denver International Airport. In some cases, individual merchants have purchased portions of the ads to feature their businesses.
Roger Tapia, owner of Plummers Jewelry and chairman of Golden’s Downtown Merchants’ Association, says the advertising campaign has been “real good” for his store and many others in the downtown area. He is also enthusiastic about the program’s “When in Golden, Win in Golden” marketing concept, in which shoppers are entered in a drawing for merchandise. “Customers get an entry for each $20 purchase,” he says, which encourages them to buy more.
But is the overall marketing campaign a success? Glueck says that’s “the $64,000 question.”
Golden is evaluating the marketing effort by measuring a number of factors, including participating merchants’ satisfaction. Glueck says that when merchants were recently surveyed, 70 percent of those responding gave a very high satisfaction rating to the marketing effort.
Sales tax revenues are, of course, another important measurement of success. According to Glueck, downtown Golden is “doing slightly better” than businesses citywide. In the first half of 2005, revenues from downtown restaurants were up 8 percent, he says, while general merchandise revenues rose by 5 percent – a rate many towns would envy.
A third measurement – the marketing campaign’s impact on visitorship – is less conclusive. Gary Wink, president of the Golden Chamber of Commerce, says visitorship “bounces around” from year to year, based partly on the state of the U.S. economy. For example, 1.3 million people visited Golden in 2004, including 225,000 brought to town by Coors national advertising campaigns. That number was up from 2003, but down from 2000, when a record 1.8 million people came to town.
In a final evaluation measurement, each year Golden asks an outside firm to evaluate awareness of the downtown’s marketing program by conducting a survey of people living on the west side of the metro area.
For the past three years, the survey has shown a “healthy increase” in awareness, Glueck says. For example, when 300 residents with Golden ZIP codes were asked in 2001 if they were familiar with the city’s marketing efforts, 23 percent answered “yes.” That number jumped to 55 percent in 2003, and to more than 60 percent this year.
In addition, this year’s survey was expanded to include seven additional ZIP codes in Arvada, Wheat Ridge and Denver. In what Glueck calls “extremely good news,” 53 percent of people in the expanded area were also aware of Golden’s marketing efforts.
It’s refreshing to see small, independent merchants, who too often focus only on their own promotional efforts, joining forces for the good of all. Merchants in other cities whose downtowns are suffering in the state’s economic downturn may want to consider emulating some version of Golden’s marketing efforts.
