Marketing the market town

What happens when the thing you're trying to sell isn't a shop, hotel or restaurant, but an entire place and nobody is entirely in charge of it?

Market towns are rather good at marketing themselves without appearing to do any marketing at all.

There is the church tower glimpsed at the end of the street. A butcher with sausages hanging in the window. Tables outside the café when the sun appears. A handwritten board announcing asparagus from somewhere nearby. The market on Thursday. A bookshop. A pub with the right sort of fire.

Add a Georgian façade, a river and somewhere decent to buy bread and things are looking particularly promising.

None of this necessarily came from a strategy.

And yet, together, it creates a remarkably strong proposition.

The interesting question is what happens when somebody decides the town needs marketing.

The place is the product

Most marketing begins with something relatively contained.

A product. A service. A business.

A town is more complicated.

The bakery doesn't control the car park. The council doesn't choose the flowers outside the pub. The antique dealer has no say over whether the public toilets are open. The café can make an excellent flat white but can't stop the shop three doors down covering its Georgian frontage in vinyl.

Yet the visitor experiences all of it as one place.

That makes the marketing of towns an unusual collective endeavour.

Everyone is contributing to the brand, including the people who have never attended a branding meeting and would be horrified to discover they were doing so.

What are we actually selling?

Look at the way British towns promote themselves and certain words appear with impressive regularity.

Historic. Vibrant. Unique.

Often accompanied by nestled, bustling and something for everyone.

The difficulty isn't that any of these things are necessarily untrue.

It's that they could describe almost anywhere. A useful place strategy has to get considerably more specific. Why this town? Why would somebody drive past another one to spend Saturday here?

Perhaps it has an unusually good concentration of antique dealers. An exceptional food market. Georgian architecture. A cluster of independent fashion shops. A literary history. A river you can swim in. The best collection of second-hand bookshops for 50 miles.

The interesting thing about a place is rarely that it has something for everyone.

Usually it's that it has something particularly good for someone.

The high street is the campaign

There is a temptation to solve place marketing with communications. A new website. A visitor guide. A logo. Some banners attached to lampposts. These things have their uses. But if the high street itself is disappointing, no amount of beautifully art-directed photography will fix the problem for long.

The actual marketing happens when somebody arrives. Can they park? Is there somewhere good to eat? Are the shops open? Can they find the market? Is the street pleasant to walk along? Is there a reason to wander around the corner? Can they find a public loo? Would they tell somebody else to come?

Place marketing and place-making are difficult to separate because the experience is the message.

A beautifully designed campaign might persuade somebody to visit once.

The town has to do the rest.

Give people a reason to make the journey

Market towns occupy an interesting position. They aren't cities. That's part of their appeal.

But they are competing with cities, retail parks, online shopping, garden centres, out-of-town destinations and the extremely compelling prospect of staying at home. Convenience is unlikely to be their strongest card. Distinctiveness might be.

People will travel surprisingly far for something they can't get everywhere.

A very good market.

A particular restaurant.

Independent shops.

An exhibition.

A garden.

An annual event.

A specialist dealer.

Even a really excellent cake.

One remarkable business can bring people into a town. Several clustered together can change its reputation. This is where supporting independents stops being simply a nice thing for a council or community to do.

They are part of the visitor economy.

Think in itineraries

Perhaps towns could borrow something from travel publishing.

Don't simply give people a directory.

Give them a day.

Arrive early enough for coffee here. Walk through the market. Take this street rather than that one. Go into the hardware shop even if you don't need anything. Have lunch at the pub. Walk along the river afterwards. Before leaving, buy bread from the bakery.

This is far more useful than a list of 73 businesses arranged alphabetically. It also encourages businesses to think collectively. The florist benefits from the café being good. The café benefits from the market being busy. The market benefits from people having another reason to stay for lunch.

A successful town isn't simply a collection of individual businesses competing for the same customer.

It's an ecosystem.

The longer someone stays, the more everyone stands to gain.

Market day matters

The clue, of course, is in the name.

Market towns were built around exchange. People came in from the surrounding area to buy, sell, talk, eat, hear news and see what was going on. Commerce and community weren't separate activities. The market gave people a reason to be there.

That function still matters.

A good market creates movement through a town. It gives regular visitors a reason to return and occasional visitors a reason to choose a particular day. It provides a relatively accessible route for new businesses to test an idea without immediately taking on a shop.

Most importantly, it makes the town feel active.

There is a significant difference between a place containing shops and a place where something is happening.

Don't polish away the local bit

Place branding can become strangely anxious about appearing professional.

A new identity arrives and suddenly everything is one typeface, three colours and a carefully constructed strapline. Meanwhile, some of the most memorable things about the town may be the exact opposite.

An eccentric shop sign.

The flower stall that's been in the same spot for decades.

A peculiar local tradition.

The market trader who shouts.

The independent shop with a window display nobody else would have approved.

The annual event that makes little sense to outsiders.

These aren't inconveniences to be tidied away.

They're assets.

People don't travel to market towns hoping they'll resemble every other market town.

The local bit is rather the point.

Everybody is in marketing

Perhaps this is what makes marketing a place so difficult and so interesting.

Nobody owns the whole experience.

The council can improve the public realm. Businesses can improve their shopfronts. Market organisers can bring in good traders. Residents can support the businesses they want to keep. Landlords can decide whether an empty unit becomes an opportunity or remains empty.

Each decision seems small.

Together they determine whether a place feels as though it is going somewhere.

And that's ultimately what people respond to.

Not simply whether a town is picturesque.

Whether it feels alive.

BORROW THE THINKING, NOT THE BUDGET

Market the day, not the directory.

Work out what is genuinely distinctive. Give people a reason to make the journey. Make it easy to spend several hours rather than 20 minutes. Treat independent businesses as part of the attraction, not simply occupants of commercial units.

And remember that the best piece of marketing a town has is the town itself.

Make the place worth talking about first.