If you read the subject line or the metadata of this e-blast, you’ll see we’ve got a wild-ass hodgepodge of brain-stretching topics to talk about today. This edition runs the gamut from apposite insights grace à the latest Deloitte Holiday Survey, a quick-hitting guide to amping your first impression on Instagram, to trauma-informed co-design and community engagement considerations, to why the Tok rocks — and lastly, a seemingly meaningless study of two mixed-use places that are poppin’ off in Texas. Yeehaw! And this may all seem radically irrelevant to us urban place management professionals — and yet, NOT! Sometimes it’s good to get uncomfortable, and sometimes the sweetest lessons come from surprisingly unexpected places. So that’s kinda the undercurrent for this edition of the Bright Brothers Bulletin. We out heyah, wrangling up the most applicable bits to bring you lessons, learnings, and relevant information from related industries — that all inform how we can do better at our jobs for the citizens and denizens of our dichotomous urban enclaves. So, pop a cocoa and get comfy, because it all plays out below. Raise your hand if you’ve personally learned something from our Bulletin.
Holiday hearts and best wishes,
– Your Bright Brothers Team
David Romako / Josh Yeager / Brandi Walsh
The calendar says November, which means holiday activations, parades, installations, festive string lights festooned from trees, and sidewalk Santas out and about. It also means it’s that critical season to support your ratepayers. Some of you celebrate Shop Small Saturday. Some of you put out locally-curated holiday gift guides. Some of you host holiday markets and hold ceremonies to light up Christmas trees and Menorahs to bring some light into the cold winter night. But if you wanna know what’s at the forefront of consumers’ minds this holiday season — look no further than the 2024 Deloitte Holiday Survey. Several things stood out to us this year. Consumers are gonna spend, no matter what. There are undercurrents of frugality and cost-cutting. And, “experiences” are taking pole positions during the holidays this season. What does this say to us? Lean into the experiential. Time and again, pundit after placemaking professional has touted “experiential” and mixed-use as keys to recovery. But experiential doesn’t have to mean gifting trips to Spain. It can be as simple as community-driven events, holiday parties, tree and menorah lightings, and more. Do your markets feature make-and-takes? How interactive are your light shows? Does your ratepayer base include omakase-style restaurants, ax-throwing, pottery painting, or cooking classes at a local restaurant or resort? The Deloitte survey indicated that while spending may be relatively flat (estimated – 3% Y-O-Y), “non-gift purchases such as party apparel and decorations continue to gain in importance” to the tune of +9% Y-O-Y. That’s a 12-point delta, that you can sway in your favor by leaning into the experiences your district offers either directly through ratepayers, your holiday programming, or other means. Doing something cool, creative, or unique this season? Share it with us and the community and we may just include you in an upcoming e-blast!
Fact is, most people judge a book by its cover. And that translates to your Insta profile too. You’ve got seven seconds to make a good impression, so glow up your bio this holiday season and see how it impacts your social conversions. This nifty lil guide from Later (the social management company) is chock full of timely tidbits, trendy tricks and rock solid suggestions for making those sparse seconds count. Good luck, and remember — you only have one chance to make a good first impression.
…that many parallels exist between the worlds of (property) development, land use, urban planning, placemaking, and urban place management? It feels like every week we’re seeing cross-industry, interdisciplinary approaches between these realms that make sense for the IDA set, cities, and tourism professionals collectively. This article from The Developer, (we love this org, as they aim to eradicate systemic racism and sexism in property development and urban planning) inspired us to consider how trauma-informed approaches from architecture and planning are absolutely applicable to many of our undertakings as placemakers. When you’re doing community engagement around your organization, your community’s needs and wants, your next placemaking project, event programming, or public realm activation — please take a minute to read that brief piece, and take a cue from our cousins working in a different discipline. Read the article once through. Then read it again and swap out in your mind, if you will, mentions of “architectural or property design” and consider “urban placemaking” in its place. Consider how co-design processes are taking precedence in shaping the physical infrastructure of our cities, and apply some of these progressive practices to our UPMO approaches. We think you’ll see that many of these best practices are completely applicable to us as economic developers, public realm advocates, straight-up placemakers, and the marketing and comms folks who are on the front lines of public discourse. Co-design would go a long way in building in-roads, trust, and more positive successful, long-term outcomes for our districts, downtowns, and cities across the board. Let us know what you think!
Wanna know why TikTok is better than Google at answering your questions? Because it’s populated by people. It’s people-driven content. It’s honest, real and relatable. And TikTok can answer your questions in seconds, rather than meandering through a maze of distributed details, sponsored content, over-bloated blogs and verbose, vapid websites. Case in point, how many times have you googled a recipe, only to become bored, disinterested, or frustrated by the tales of someone’s grandpa’s culinary adventures in France during WWII? We don’t care. But what we do care about is people — and that’s why TikTok content counts. We’ve been talking about this trend all year now, but these six slides, and the associated text tell you all you need to know as to why TikTok is usurping Google SERPs. That’s bad news if your name is Sergey Brin, but good news for us content marketers.
Regardless of whether you’re a 300-year-old Northeast city, a newly blossoming sunbelt community, or a suburban planned project designed to mimic authentic, urban experiences — the lessons are the same today for us as place management professionals. We enjoyed this analysis from those great minds at Gensler that compares and contrasts two mixed-use locales in Texas, because the lessons learned apply to our careers as community stewards. We love looking outside the IDA bubble for inspo, best practices, and evidence-based case scenarios to support our work in economic development and placemaking. So consider these two Western developments and set aside the planned use aspects, and focus on the parallels and lessons we can glean for our organic communities. Most of us are engaged in supporting communities consisting of residential, restaurants and retail, offices and parking garages, ensconced in attractive landscaping, with green space and flexible meeting space for community activations. These planned communities are homogenic, pasteurized, sterilized versions of cities — and for many, that’s the ideal scenario. There’s a quote that frequently comes to mind from Robert Fishman’s iconic 1987 analysis “Bourgeois Utopias”. Fishman so poignantly observed that “Buried deep within every subsequent suburban dream is a nightmare image of 18th century London,” and that illuminates the allure of the clean-façaded, ubiquitous, REI-, Wegmans- and fast casual-anchored suburban “lifestyle centers” of today. And functionally, at face value, there’s really no difference from an organic downtown. As the article states, “experience trumps the transaction”, and while many of us as true “urban advocates” may scoff at a planned community — the reality is that people may leave cities in droves again (as evidenced by this alarming prognosis from Popular Mechanics, which proffers that…researchers have come to believe that nearly 15,000 U.S. cities will face noticeable depopulation by 2100). So it’s never too late to take a page out of the playbook of what’s working in other “places”.
