Marketing and Transit: Uniquely Intertwined

Brick and Mortar businesses, let's consider how you make your sales. You need people in-store which requires them to travel from their home to your store. Now why would they choose your mom and pop shop over a national retailer? It is tied to your proximity, right? Let's dig deeper into that for the consumer. The value of proximity is rooted in convenience. The large retailers have this in spades and you must consider the ease of access to these big box stores. Now do not go building a huge parking lot in a downtown, that is not the takeaway here.

One option would be to increase local volume to overcome the lost revenue to the major retailers. In my hometown (Canton Ohio), this could look like turning former industrial buildings into dense housing similar to how they have re-developed some of the Hercules plant. This would require the apartments to be rent controlled to collect current Canton citizens to an area with more community amenities. This is a bit outside of a business owners direct control.

We instead can utilize our marketing budgets to encourage conversions via lubricating access to our storefront. We have seen some bars in Cleveland run a bus out into the deep east and west suburbs to bring people to W. 6th St. The chamber of commerce could help organize with a few other local businesses to improve the bus frequency/head-ways. The marketing around these services would be better suited using pooled resources.

If you are not interested in pursuing a private line, then you need to be advocating for your local public transit. They are the oil to our financial engine. Stop relying on individual access to cars as a filter for our audience. Especially when you are a part of a downtown that could include the necessities like a full service grocer (not a convenience store) a clothing store, and a hardware store.

Fighting the economies of scale is an up hill battle. The easiest way would be use our currently available power structure to remove these big box stores. We can start by levying heavy taxes on these stores to pay for the heavy infrastructure that they require. We are able to build suburbs because they are supported by the "convenience" the Walmart & Crew provide. We are trading our local economies/communities health for convenience and it is just not a good enough deal.

If your politician talks about "revitalizing downtown" without a plan to improve access to downtown for current citizens, they are merely paying lip service. We must hold our local politicians accountable.