Beyond the City Limits

Magnetic Epicenters: The Magic Is in the Mixing

The power of urban spaces is that they are compact geographic environments -- magnetic epicenters -- that attract people from various cultures who have different attitudes and mind-sets. When people migrate to these epicenters, they fuse with everyone else, adding their own cultures, their own nuances and attitudes. Urban life is in a constant state of flux. It's forever reinventing itself. There is magic in this mix.

And that magic gets exported. Think about New York City. You've got 3 million commuters coming here every day. They come from Bronxville and Scarsdale, in New York; from Hartford, Connecticut; from Hoboken, New Jersey; even from Philadelphia. And people from Boston and Washington, DC travel to this city almost daily. What do they all do? They pick up on what's happening in the marketplace here. They're here 8, 10, 12 hours a day. They're influenced by what they see at Grand Central Station and by what they eat at restaurants. Then they go home with those attitudes and influences, which then wind up on their kitchen tables. Salsa is the number-one condiment in America today -- number one! Ten years ago, salsa was something that you'd find only in Mexican restaurants.

As an urban center, New York City affects the world. Los Angeles affects the West. Miami affects Florida. Chicago affects the Midwest. People outside those areas are constantly looking to those epicenters for cues about what to do and even how to behave. So, from a marketing standpoint, urban centers are not niche markets. They're home to a critical mass of consumers who live, think, and act differently and who affect a larger whole -- and force you to recalibrate your approach to them.

Points of Fusion: How (and Where) to Market

Companies that are serious about reaching urban markets understand that they face some basic questions: Who are we trying to reach? How do we engage that audience? And where do we deliver our messages?

Take our work with Major League Baseball. Sure, baseball is our national pastime, and there's room to market the sport on a national basis. But the way you make a national campaign effective is by finding opportunities to localize it. That's what our "fan mail" campaign did. The idea was the same all around the country: Baseball players become fans of baseball fans. In one national spot, a guy gets a package from Tony Gwynn, of the San Diego Padres, containing the lyrics to "The Star-Spangled Banner." In an accompanying note, Tony explains that he and some of his fellow players noticed that the fan couldn't remember all of the words to the song. We also customized 22 spots for specific teams. For the LA Dodgers, for example, second baseman Eric Young (who has since been traded to the Chicago Cubs) faxed a note of congratulations to a fan for making a remarkable catch from the stands.

That's one piece of the puzzle: how you communicate. Another big issue is "Who are you trying to reach, exactly?" Major League Baseball has realized that it has many different audiences, all of which come together at a ballpark to form a sort of minicity. In Los Angeles, 50% of the audience might be Mexican. In Texas, many of the fans are Mexican and Vietnamese. In New York, the mix of fans includes a little bit of everybody! African-Americans, Indians, Israelis, Pakistanis -- they all go to baseball games. So you can no longer sell only beer and hot dogs. You've also got to sell nachos, salsa, grits, and sushi. Of course, families go to games too. And they don't want to sit in the bleachers with all of those "bleacher creatures" who are throwing beer at one another. Families want a controlled environment. And when businesspeople go to games, they want luxury. So you've got a little urban world right in the ballpark.

Marketers must ask another big question: Where do you reach people most effectively? We've discovered that we must look for "points of fusion" -- places that have a constant flow of people who can process your message and then export it to others. Each urban center has its critical intersections. In New York, one of those places is Grand Central Station. Other places are the lobby of the World Trade Center and the corner of Broadway and Houston. Smaller points of fusion include bathrooms in hot restaurants and clubs, as well as inner-city gas stations (because there are so few of them in the city).

Finding those fusion points is a simple task. But using them effectively requires a lot of work. If you want to interact with customers -- either to ask questions or to send messages -- you have to go where they are, to places where they are most comfortable and therefore most receptive. Customers won't come to you anymore. You have to go to the points of fusion that they frequent.

Why are companies willing to advertise in bathrooms today? Ten years ago, that would have been a dirty thought. If you had suggested to a client that you were going to put framed 8-by-24-inch posters in bathroom stalls, you'd either have been laughed at, fired, or both. But today, that's a good way to reach urban consumers -- people who are clubbing, or eating out three or four nights a week. Noxzema has done a bang-up job with that approach by developing a whole new strategy based on one question: How do you reach urban women, who buy more makeup and lipstick than suburban women do? Noxzema got in their faces -- literally -- by placing ads in the bathrooms of clubs and restaurants.