Creating Experiences on Main Street
Wyandotte is starting to discover now what other historic cities like Charleston and Savannah have known for nearly seventy years, and what cities across the U.S. have realized since the advent of the historic preservation movement in the 1960’s – that places which are interesting, distinct, visually stimulating, historically rich, and different from any-other-place are the one’s that survive in this increasingly competitive global economy that tends toward homogeneity though rewards difference and uniqueness.
This point was made by Andrew Zolli in Lansing last week, giving the keynote address at the Art of Creating Cool conference. There he described the rapid change and evolution of business models from the exchange of commodities, to providing products, services, and finally to creating experiences. The example he uses is coffee. A pound of raw coffee beans costs pennies. If you grind it and put it in a can, it becomes a product and you can charge a little more. The Wal-Mart’s, K-Mart’s, and Meijer’s of the world have a pretty firm grasp on selling products. The next level is service – like when Duncan Donuts pours hot water over the coffee beans and gives it to you with a gooey donut. The highest level of economic activity which also has the effect of humanizing the capitalist system is creating experiences.
Starbucks and Walt Disney are two masters of experience-making. Think about it. You enter Starbucks and pleasant but not overly-loud or overly-quiet music is playing. There are cushy couches to sit on and often a warm fire in winter or cool air in summer. And you can sit there with your mocha-latte-grande-with whipped cream and sprinkles on top for hours in pure sensory bliss. Starbucks is not merely in the business of selling commodities (coffee beans) or products (canned coffee beans), but in the business of experience-making.
Now, what can Wyandotte learn from such an industry leader and innovator? Even today after ignoring our heritage and what makes us unique to such an extreme degree, it is possible to put together the pieces that we have – an eclectic collection of buildings from the 19th and early-to-mid 20th century, a concentration of galleries, hip and new restaurants, and a string of bars close together that draw a crowd of different generations – then to market these together, fill in the gaps with other business and activities, and most importantly to create EXPERIENCES to complement what is already there.
Once acknowledging Wyandotte’s strengths of what it has today and what it has been historically, then we can work to create an experience-rich downtown and city. Making a city with activity 24-7 is important (or at least 20-7 or 18-7), making sure there is something to do in the early morning, during the day, in the evening, and late at night – will make our city a center for activity, magnetically attracting people at all times of day. Another aspect of experience making is appealing to people of all generations. If Disney World only had roller-coasters it would be a flop, but between the exciting rides are shops, concession stands, and things for grandparents or parents to do together with their children. Aspiring to create an environment that mixes people of different ages and generations in Wyandotte is important.
Perhaps the most important aspect of experience-making is design. In the 1960s and 1970s it was argued that clearing away the old buildings and providing ample parking was the way to save downtown. Regrettably it wasn’t and by bulldozing or homogenizing half of our downtown, we took away half of our greatest asset – our historic character, our uniqueness, and what made us unlike any other place.
There is an opportunity to reverse these trends, however, and to build on a growing wave of entrepreneurship and what might be called “progress” in Wyandotte, by using an approach that the National Trust for Historic Preservation created in the 1970’s to help historic downtowns like our own. The Main Street program emphasizes design, organization, promotion, and economic restructuring. People from the community work together on several teams to implement strategies and to realize measurable results. This program has been effective in communities throughout the United States in the last quarter-century. Now, the question for the people of Wyandotte is – has you time come? I think it has.
As published in the Downriver Review, December 11, 2005.