Buy Local, Be Local

In part 2 of my interview with David Hamilton, David talks about how the “be local” campaign started and their intentions for it. If you want to know more about the campaign, here’s your inside source.

Sean: OK the “be local” campaign, how did you all come up with this idea?

David: Well, actually Jeremy Spencer and Beth Garrett, who serve on the Chamber board, came up with it in one of our board meetings. We’ve always talked about trying to promote shop local, buy local, but I guess we got distracted by other issues going on. Like when we recruited Bridgestone, we really concentrated on that. [Same with] MetriCan. We kind of became distracted

at times but this came up about six months ago at a board meeting. So Beth, Jeremy, and I got a few more people in the Chamber. We got Dick Graham, Bob Rial , Scott England, and Ervin Upchurch who is now on our board. Ashley Ramp from Tri-Star Bank and a lady from downtown. We just got a group of business people together and we talked about it. Jeremy got on a website on saw a similar campaign in South Carolina or North Carolina; he saw it on the web. He came to us with a logo. We thought, “You know that’s a great idea.” We talked about how could we promote this in the community and what all we wanted to do with it.

It really has different focuses. One is we wanted to educate the public on the benefits of shopping locally. We wanted them to know about the sales taxes that come in, and what it goes to, how that helps our local economy and our local governments that provide services. The other is we want encourage people to consider buying locally and eating out locally instead of going to Nashville or Franklin to the mall. When you’re going to buy a pair of shoes or some pants, see if you can find them here. We know that everybody isn’t going to shop in Dickson County; I’m not going to buy everything that I buy in Dickson County. It’s just not possible. But there are a lot of things you can buy here, and that’s really what we’re trying to get across to people, is to think about it. When you go out to buy something, think about Dickson County first. See if maybe they have a store in White Bluff that has what you need, or maybe there’s one in Charlotte or Burns. Think about what you can find here before you go to the mall and buy it.
One of the things that’s important about shopping locally is that the local business community supports so many other activities and organizations in the county, like little league baseball, soccer, United Way, and the help center. Name me a business outside of Dickson County that you buy stuff from that supports any of those. They don’t. So, not only do you lose the sales tax [by not shopping locally], you’re losing money that you could be providing businesses with that they could turn around and invest in the community, so that’s the other part of it.
Then the other part of the campaign, which we did last week. . .we didn’t do shop local obviously, but we did a campaign in the surrounding counties when we had the tax free weekend. We did advertisements in the surrounding Shoppers in Cheatham County, Humphreys and Hickman, Houston and some others, I think, encouraging them that if they were going to shop for back to school during tax free weekend to come to Dickson County and see what we have to offer. So, it’s not just “shop local” for local people, it’s also to try to draw people from outside. We are a mini-hub, I would say, of retail for the Western portion of Middle Tennessee. We draw from the surrounding counties, and so it’s been a very good campaign. We’ve been very pleased at the response. We’ve been on Channel 2 News, Channel 4, and Channel 5 from Nashville promoting the campaign. We’ve sold a little over 700 t-shirts for “Buy Local”. Businesses are wearing them on the first Friday of the month now, and obviously if they want to wear them more that’s fine. They wore them every Friday in July. We have signs and banners around, and we’re getting requests from people wanting banners so they can put them in front of their businesses. It’s really growing and getting a lot of support. We’re looking at some other ideas on what we can do to branch out a little more and maybe broaden our program with our efforts. We’ve been pretty pleased with it.

S: That’s good. Are you able to measure any performance with it?

D: I think that’s kind of like advertising. How do you ever know when you do something if it’s really resulting in sales? Honestly, no, we haven’t looked at that. I don’t know how we could track that. Now, I can tell you that I have had business people, when I’ve been in their stores or run into them around town, that have stopped me and said, “This campaign is really benefiting us. We’ve had people come in who have said they’ve seen the campaign and the signs around and they’re more conscious about shopping local.” I had one business person who said, “I’ve been buying my materials out of the county for years, but I got to thinking that maybe I’d see if I could buy them here in Dickson County.” He said, “I found a place where I can buy them. I actually got them cheaper. Now I’ve moved all that business to that person.” How much is it working? I don’t know. I think it is working. Even myself, I’m more conscious about it. You just think about it. And that’s really what it’s all about. It’s kind of a subliminal message, getting people in that mindset of, “Hey I’m not going to go to Nashville and buy those shoes. Let me go down to downtown Dickson, let me see if I can find them.” And then again there are things we don’t have here but hopefully as we grow we’ll continue to get those opportunities and people will continue to shop locally.

S: How long are you planning to run the campaign?

D: I don’t know that we have a definite one year, two year, five year [timeline]. I think it’s something we’re going to continue as we can. Obviously it’s going wear itself out at some point. I know we’re talking through this year because there are certain times of the year we want to really continue the campaign and really promote it. The tax free back to school time, between Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping, during the holiday shopping we want to get the message back out. Probably in the spring around Easter and about that time we’ll get it back out and really promote it. But we’re still going to do little things and have our banners out throughout the year. I think after a year or so when it’s kind of run its course we’ll probably back off some of that. Hopefully we can come up with a different idea to change it up a little bit, renew it, and get more energy behind it. I don’t know; we’ll just have to wait and see. It’s new for us so we’ll see. We have a good committee and they’re really energetic, excited about it, and we’ve got some people involved in that committee who haven’t been involved with the Chamber in the past since I’ve been here. It’s kind of got some new blood involved and that’s what we are trying to do. We want to have more people involved with us because we’re looking for ideas everyday in what we can do to improve the Chamber that would benefit the community and the business community. Any ideas people have, we’re always open for them.

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Well, there you have it. Interesting isn’t it? Well, I hope to see you back for the last segment.