My good friend Nancy O. Graham, who runs Oswegatchie and Alternative Films for Kids, sent this about marketing Kingston, a small upstate city, as a tech hub. She found it on a blog called Kingston Citizens.

“The city has a brand, but it is dormant,” Green said. “It needs to be brought back to life, and this is one way to do it.”

To see his entire proposal, read on…

Marketing Kingston, New York:
Creating A New Digital Tech-Friendly Brand

PART ONE: The Challenge for Kingston

Kingston’s Existing Marketing Brand: Kingston has typically been
branded as an arts city with historic tourist attractions. This
existing brand offers no point of difference from any other town in the
Hudson Valley (or the Northeastern United States) and provides no clear
incentives for potential incoming businesses or residents to choose
Kingston. Furthermore, this brand is inert and vague.

Summary of Current Economic Development Challenges: Kingston is
pursuing a traditional economic development strategy. With limited
success, Kingston is attempting to attract small to medium
manufacturing. Kingston is also also trying to attract national retail
chains to shore up the city’s depleted retail tax base. To this end,
the city of Kingston has undertaken an effort to shift the tax burden
from businesses to home owners assuming that it is the retail tax
burden that is causing small start up retail to often fail.

But this is not the key issue for the lack of healthy retail in Kingston.

Although high taxes do not help struggling Kingston retail
businesses, the primary issue is that a large percentage of the
residents of Kingston are low/fixed income and do not have the
disposable income necessary to drive local retail. When they do spend
money, they buy almost exclusively based on lowest price, which means
they shop at big box discount retailers like WalMart. This makes
creating robust retail activity in Kingston a challenging prospect.

Part Two: The Opportunity for Kingston

The solution: Recruit a new class of resident with a higher income
level and a community minded interest in supporting local businesses.

Proposal:
Kingston should make a concerted effort to attract New York City and
New York State wide web/digital entrepreneurs to relocate and set up
shop in Kingston by branding itself as the upstate digital
tech-friendly city.

Web entrepreneurs will find Kingston attractive due to the price
point of real estate and the slightly more urban quality Kingston
offers.

The benefits of attracting web/digital entrepreneurs to Kingston include the following:
* They have disposable income to fuel retail.
* Their income does not rely on the state or local tax base. (They are
not teachers, city employees, or the product of a city or state funded
jobs initiative.)
* Because they have a range of clients both nation wide and by business
category , they function as “economic shock absorbers” for Kingston
during times of regional or business category specific economic
downturns.
* They purchase property, thereby taking real estate off of the rental roles and potentially eliminating “absentee landlords”.
* They hire local businesses/contractors to renovate property, improving Kingston’s economic outlook and housing stock
* They skew more progressive politically, thereby being mindful of
shopping locally and supporting local retail businesses. (They tend to
shop based on value not just on price.)
* They tend to be more active politically and in terms of their community.