 Check the speaker Perfect All of our branding meetings and It's such a better quality when you guys are all involved. So I thank you so much And I think you're for being here tonight and I also just want to say thanks to Trip and to Ben I think most of you know them now Annette Muldrow associates They have become friends over the past few days and I'm gonna be sad to see them leave when they have to go But I'm really excited. I will be back. I know Can't shake that. That's right. And so I'm really excited for you guys to see what they've come up with and Without further ado Great, thanks Ashley, it's a real pleasure. It's great to see so many familiar faces For those of you who didn't see us We've had the privilege of working all over the state of Vermont and we've always been somewhat envious Of the chance to work here in Montpelier the capital city. So it's a real thrill to be here It's a real thrill to be here this evening What we're gonna do I go through the boring part of the presentation which is the zip code data and the market analysis and I know Richard Amore from the state is in the audience somewhere who will be Making faces at me if I go too long and then Ben will eventually throw something at me if I go too long Because the real purpose of this is to use that marketing data Then to help inform some of the things that we talk about in Britain Ben's marketing and image building Piece of this. I'll do a handoff to him later on We worked with merchants here in Montpelier to conduct a zip code survey. It was extremely successful We had 19 merchants participate We recently did one in Middlebury. We had exactly 19 participate there as well They did about 2,100 customer Visits you all recorded 3,100 customer visits Those customer visits represent 633 unique American zip codes that passed through this community in a seven-day period Among the communities we work this puts you in the top ten That we've ever done work in as far as having number of American zip codes passing through Those zip codes represent 42 states Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia They represent five Canadian provinces and they represent 11 foreign countries and six continents across the world We did not have someone from Antarctica show up And I will tell you yes, you did not get the Golden North Decoden That's the elusive creature that we never seem to find in any of our market studies And so but nevertheless it is really neat to see that kind of data Certainly, that's impressive. It's neat to see that at the end of the day 40% of the customers recorded a Montpelier zip code. So this those of you who talk about Say, you know, we shop local we spend money local we Talk the talk you're walking the walk and it's evident in this Slide here that 40% recorded a Montpelier 05602 zip code My little labels are a little bit off, but East Montpelier is the red Well the red sliver here another four percent Berry six percent the green sliver here and then you have Waterbury more town Worcester Northfield Plainfield and then Chittenden County as a whole represents about three percent We wanted to sort of pull the Chittenden County out just to see what it was The rest of Vermont is about 15 percent That's the area where things start to get fuzzy as to are they a visitor? Are they doing business here? Are they tourists are that you know, there's a line drawn You know when I see someone from Rutland You know, maybe they're transacting business. Maybe they're a visitor. Maybe they're up here You know, who knows it could be a combination of things and visitors a tough term to use But having that 15% is neat to see and then the true visitor Yeah, Canadians 2% Residents of New York and Massachusetts 3% each In working in Church Street marketplace. We saw a very similar trend where Canadians represented about 2% New York and Massachusetts were about three and a half four percent You're mirroring a little bit of what we saw in Church Street marketplace Which always get a kick out of because we talk a lot about Canadians But we tend to overemphasize how much they come my only hypothesis to that is that they talk different than we do whereas the New Yorker and the Massachusetts resident unless they're from South Boston, you know talk fairly similar But when you have someone speaking French, they're obviously not from, you know, right around the corner. So Yes Appreciate you bringing that out ahead of time because when we looked at the other states We are clearly recognizable when we're shopping in Montpelier and it was great It's very rare for me to see my own zip code. So I'm trying to figure out who it is that was up here During that time and then the other countries that we mentioned represent 1% of the market The trade areas indicate where you're most This is where we sort of shift and talk about the raw customer the raw data to where your most loyal Customers are where your most reliable customers come from And what we're doing here is looking at Both primary trade area and secondary trade area and we're compensating for the population Inside those zip codes as you know You know East Montpelier is a much smaller population Zip code then is the population of the Montpelier zip code. So when we do that I come up with this Remarkably Semi-confusing chart and we're trying to look at visits per thousand residents and that visits per thousand Residents gives us an indicator of how loyal the customers are and so clearly 05602 was the most loyal 1278 visits out of the 3,000 I mentioned 110 visits per thousand residents that population is for the zip code Which is why it doesn't match what you traditionally think of as the city's population? East Montpelier 67 visits per thousand people 43 visits and then we see a pretty big jump There before you get to more town from 43 to 24 Anyone who does market analysis if they try and tell you it's a science. They're lying. It's a little bit of voodoo and a little bit of Mixing potions in the back room and trying to figure out where to draw some of these lines We could have drawn the line just at Montpelier and then said the rest was secondary trade area I figured let's go ahead and throw the other two in we're not really going to add a whole lot of Massive amount of retail we'll add a few more consumers and we'll see how the numbers shake out You do see though. I think it's important to note That water berry and berry 19 visits per thousand berry 11 visits per thousand I mean water berry 11 visits per thousand very similar pattern That we would see when we worked in water berry and we worked in berry that there's sort of a pretty big drop-off of Customer loyalty of Montpelier residents coming to water berry Montpelier residents coming to berry So it's not that they're sliding you there are some sort of lines that are drawn that people don't often Cross when we look at some of these markets I did put Chittenden County in because you had a hundred and three visits from the county But that with the size of the county represents only point six visits per thousand residents And certainly that doesn't mean that you don't market to them But it means that when we start running our numbers We don't need to run Chittenden County numbers that it operates really as an independent market And so we were looking at your primary and secondary trade area We're looking at a market that works together even though you may not always cross the lines There are certain instances where you are you are crossing the lines to get things that you simply can't get Inside this local market. You're tending to go to these adjacent markets nearby When we look at the next we're looking at retail leakage these are charts that will make your eyes go cross But it does help affirm some things that I think you all That were evident in the pie chart, but that you all probably intuitively know We're looking at local dollars being spent as That compares to what stores sell so if consumers are Spending more dollars than local stores are selling you're leaking sales. That means that those dollars are going elsewhere If you're selling more than local consumers spend that means that you're importing sales And so I'm showing you the primary trade area again, which is the three zip codes We can get into the secondary trade area have run those numbers, but again I don't want to get in trouble with then and the glamour part of the presentation When we look at this again your eyes go cross, but let me just talk you through it Those three zip codes comprise a 454 million dollar retail supply Consumers in the same zip codes are spending 255 million every year so every year this community imports 176 million dollars Into into Montpelier that should be fairly obvious to you all both from the visitor standpoint as Evidence by the pie chart and by the influx of the legislature that comes in and spends money from the outside during session And all the activity that comes on your importation of dollars is not Consistent across the board you leak dollars in some categories and gain dollars in others So you're gaining dollars in some of the automotive categories. You have automotive dealerships in the zip code You leak dollars in the furniture category, which is an interesting one to leak dollars You leak dollars in electronics not a real big surprise In building material you leak dollars But when we look at Berlin Berry that those zip codes they gain dollars So your dollars are sort of getting traded out because you're going over there to buy your building supplies and things like that Food and beverage You're selling more than local consumers can spend it makes a lot of sense It goes back to even though Northfield. We're not considering part of your primary trade area We know full well that Northfield residents are not shopping at tops every day That they're driving in to Union River co-op to do some of their shopping They're probably doing some of their shopping at Shaw's here They're probably very likely doing some of their shopping at Shaw's and Berlin as well So your food and beverage is importing you're also importing some dollars and pharmacies You do well in gasoline stations, which you know, not exactly the most glamorous downtown use But if you're on Memorial Drive, you know the preponderance of being able to fill up your car You do this really interesting thing with clothing, which is something I'm not really used to seeing You sort of alternate between leaking and gaining and leaking and gaining in the clothing categories Usually a town this size is a pretty consistent leaker in clothing sales And you're actually a net gainer in clothing sales, which is a pretty neat opportunity for you to capitalize on and continue to market Things like jewelry you gain sales And then we get into things like sporting goods where you gain sales You certainly leak sales when we get into the general merchandise categories Having no big box kind of discount retailer That's going to Berlin As you would expect they're doing a gain in that the other part wrapping up and I'll quit on the slide the I crossing slides is As you might expect you are a significant gain market in full-service dining And you're a significant loss market in limited service dining and the real difference between the two is You're standing up when they ask you if you won't fries with that at limited service dining and you're sitting down When they ask you if you won't fries or salads So the quick service as you all know famously This is the only state capital in the union without a McDonald's The fact that you don't have quick service restaurants plays out in the numbers that we have here by Contrast when you look at Berry Berlin that market they certainly do a very good job in the quick service categories in the end Your Montpelier customers. I love it when I see a local market base that Says they shop local and then demonstrate it by showing up with their feet in the doors That's really important I think part of the marketing strategy that Ben's going to be talking about is one that communicates clearly to locals and Clearly to visitors as well because we can't rely just on that. We've got to rely on that local consumer We've got to rely on that regional consumer. You're serving a pretty big hinterland that you know really stretches pretty far It's very intertwined I think as much as we like to say their barriers and But what's offered in Berlin a lot of that's not offered here Some of what's offered in Waterbury is something that you know, you're going back and forth between some of those What's offered in Berry all those trade-offs is functioning as a region. It's not overlapping Chittenden to the degree that maybe we we might have expected but Seen in a separate market to me is a good thing It means that really it is a market that's operating with its own sphere That doesn't mean you all aren't going to Trader Joe's periodically. I know you are Maybe one or two of you But it does mean that the market should not be viewed as one giant, you know Like Super Metro where the the whole thing crisscrosses one another I'll be the local market is critical Tourism and visitors are essential if we take that 15 to 20 percent out The stores and restaurants here would not be successful and you as a local market Would not enjoy the kind of breadth and depth of options that you have So the visitors that come are critical to the success of these and that puts you in Both a luxurious position But it also puts you in the position where you can't just market to the local you've got to market to the regional You've got to market to the visitor so with that I'm gonna turn it over to Ben That's my last one and let you talk through Some of the existing things that are going on I think I'll come back on and just a little bit, okay Okay, great. Well you're one of the things we always like to start with is we like to start by looking at the things that exist and I think that's probably an exercise that not a lot of folks here in Montpellier have ever done is Looking at all the different logos that existed that had no relationship to each other at all and in addition to that even some of the habits that the community had gotten into in terms of every year you might actually redesign an event logo every single year and That's pretty typical it that happens a lot especially with events that are run by Volunteers because they get tired and they want a fresh look But we have to always remember that we got to think about the consumers and that Consistency of communication to the consumers. So this is just a couple. This is the Montpellier live organizational logo And they had an organizational variation that they also use in social media Which is the square version and this is a good example of how with this recent 15-year Celebration that they had they did a really really good job of using colors and using typeface to create connectivity between The organization and the event now in addition to that there've been some really cool things that have been happening throughout the community a recent high school graduate Developed a new brand identity for the high school and They're currently working inside the school district to not only figure out how they might be able to adopt that As kind of an academic identity for the the high school But also create some branding District-wide and be able to better capture that that educational institution as a Market and in something that the community as a whole should market for growth So we wanted to pay consideration to that work that had been done and then of course We also had to look at some of the varieties of all the different things that existed already So we've got Again organizational logos. We've got things like capital city cash. We've got parks and rec department different initiatives different event logos Reoccurring amenities like the farmers market so you can see all these things have their own unique identity And there's very very few threads that connect those diets now, you know We don't expect everyone to be forced to look exactly alike. That's not the way it works but when an organization has the ability to influence the look and feel and message of a lot of different events then It only makes sense for them to bring that in underneath the umbrella And we had the unique opportunity here to not only look at Montpellier alive but also look at the city itself as a entity a governmental body and And then start to create a system that can grow and expand from there now One of the things that we always like to focus in on is is figuring out where we start from a message standpoint and That message was the thing that as we sat through stakeholder meeting after stakeholder meeting You had no problem whatsoever listing your amenities your values your qualities You had no problem at all creating long lists of things that you were proud of But then we also heard loud and clear. We don't know how to tell that story the things seem so Disconnected from one another that it sometimes is difficult to be able to tell all the different facets of our story So what we did is we crafted a narrative that we call a brand statement and that brand statement is an opportunity to start stitching those together and Then setting the stage for a graphic communication system, and I'm gonna let trip read that for you now Before I read it, I do want to take into account that a comment. We heard it at the public meeting the other night and that was why do we need a tagline and We really mulled over that a lot and took that to heart and We're actually suggesting that you're that you don't necessarily have a tagline per se But that you have a consistent message that you're sending and so We are steering clear of this whole tagline notion There are some phrases that you see that are repetitive that can be used But we really don't want to condense it down into something clever Cute or precious we really don't think the community Needs that that kind of preciousness. This is too diverse too dynamic And and your role in the state is a serious role now having said that that doesn't mean that we can't Take that serious role and embrace all the different assets that come together But as far as it's sort of coming together in a three or four word catchphrase We're really not heading in that direction So I'll read for you the brand statement Says every day we serve the people of the Green Mountain State As the seat of Vermont's government the decisions made in this smallest of capitals impacts the entire state Leaders who started here have gone on to become national figures Yet they remain tied to this place we call home Most importantly decision-makers here are our neighbors and friends You might bump into the governor at a local restaurant a Senator enjoying the farmers market and the mayor on a stroll through downtown Here we practice democracy in personal form Are not afraid to disagree without being disagreeable and The product of our work is a community that can make all Vermonters proud Every day we serve up the arts We offer an artistic environment on the caliber of much larger cities Whether it is a showing of an independent film a live production on stage artists in our galleries and sculpture in the street Art infuses our everyday life We celebrate the arts with festivals and welcome with open arms the talented students that come here To learn for the Vermont College of Fine Arts Every day we serve up the fine food and drink of A state renowned for our connection of farm and table our Restaurants are an eclectic mix of fine dining and casual fare Where cuisine both familiar and exotic come together? Our farmers market is a showcase of the bounty of our land and As home of the New England culinary Institute, we're a place where the culinary arts are honed each day Every day we serve up customer service We are the largest collection of independent businesses in central Vermont Our downtown harkens to a time when a grocer a hardware store and a pharmacist were staples in the community Add to this our specialty shops where one-of-a-kind finds are offered an array of places That would rival the shopping in some of America's most sophisticated downtown Every day we serve up recreation It is in this capital city that you can go on a hike on the mountain behind the gilded dome of the state house Hop on a bike path or off-road trail in the heart of downtown Enjoy parks unrivaled in beauty and can be on the slopes in the time. It takes most folks to get out of their neighborhood We cherish the outdoors and continually look for ways to preserve our environment in innovative ways Every day we serve our young people We cherish our children and know that in a world that is changing Our community is still a place where kids can walk downtown and neighbors look after neighbors We're deeply proud of our schools where our children not only learn But also become engaged as citizens in this most unique of places Every day Montpelier serves People come here to do the work of the people to take care of one another We do it with pride in the Green Mountain State Ours is a city that combines the ideals of America's that Americans cherish in a small town and Couples those ideals with innovation and energy Rarely found in a community of 8,000 We invite you to visit experience or stay in Montpelier America's small-town capital and a place where we serve Vermont daily So that's sort of the brand statement the sort of piece that we're looking at to describe the community Each one of these components can be used to describe further great facets of who you are as a place With that I'll turn it back over to you Right Yeah, I love that he writes so well makes my job easier You know that that document really symbolizes our attempt to bring together All the things that the stakeholders said during that that input process Because those are the things they're the passion points They're the things that the citizens of your community said loud and clear They're willing to stick up for they want to make sure that no matter what the future looks like These are the values that we want to see preserved as we become the Montpelier of tomorrow So with that we started out by looking at the city itself And you know one of the things that we always try to do is we try to express the importance of understanding that A city logo is very very different from a community identity The city is made up of elected officials They pass taxes Sometimes believe it or not they take people off They don't pick up trash right on time or snow doesn't get plowed in a way that a citizen sees fit and and then all of a sudden That becomes the identity of the place We wanted to create something and set the stage with a very very simple identity system One of the things that we noticed as we went through is currently the city really has two different Graphics that they use they have a graphic that you could see on the doors of vehicles that they have and those type things And then they also have a very historic formal seal and that formal seal actually both logos have imagery of the state house on them and That only makes sense a thank goodness. I kind of came into the community I was like man, I love to see that because a lot of times we might work in county seats and They'll have a glorious, you know courthouse in the heart of their downtown Oh, but the courthouse is the county not the city. You're not allowed to touch that You know don't use that as your image, but it seems like historically Montpelier has always been proud of That role that it plays and very proud of the image that that state house conveys So what we wanted to do was we wanted to clean up and preserve that seal That's a very important tool for them to be able to continue to use It's a tool that that honestly that that graphic should be able to last a hundred years It's not the type thing that needs to be redesigned over and over again And it represents the formal actions of the government But then we simply wanted to introduce the new typeface and and just a simple clean version of that dome so they can begin to Use this system to kind of make things clean and easy So here we introduced the the base type set now you can't really see it But this is actually a very very rich green and the green was pulled out of a photo that I took of The state house so I pulled that green directly from the trees behind it and then as well as the gold from the dome Now that dome the gold of the dome is kind of funny And you know if you know anything about the history of it before it was gilded it was red and You can imagine how differently That architectural structure would look on the skyline of Montpelier having a red painted dome And still instead of that that gilded dome. I think they did that back in like 1907 or so So here what we see is we see three different variations. First of all You can see every time we're doing this. We're taking the the name Montpelier. We're tying city of with it So very prominently so you know you're talking about the identity This says city of Montpelier and it's got Vermont then this one Introduces that moniker that trip introduced in the brand statement America's small town capital Now that is simply it's almost like a position statement It is a two-fold statement that allows you at the same time to proudly proclaim that you are the smallest capital in this in the country and That's not gonna change anytime soon You got you would have to almost double your population to get close to Pia, North Dakota So, you know, you're in good shape that that position of prominence that you have is is Very set but the thing that's nice about it is by celebrating in that way It connects with some of the things that you told us during those meetings. We're small by design We're not small by failure. We're not small because we couldn't figure out how to grow We're small because this is the size we want to be so being able to celebrate that allows you to really kind of capture That essence that we heard was a pride point from the citizens But then in addition to that it also Connects with something else that we heard over and over again America's small town capital You set the benchmark for small town life I would argue that it would be difficult to find any other community of 8,000 people that have the collection of businesses and Cultural amenities that this community has your community then that is much larger than its population And it gives you that opportunity to kind of celebrate that standard That you have somebody asked or somebody said the other day It's like you kind of walk around and wonder where Norman Rockwell is And again to reiterate. We're not this is not necessarily a tagline It's just a rephrasing of what you already say exactly, you know the smallest state capital in the Union It's using those exact same Phrasing but a little different selection of words and putting in a little bit different order So then as you say it If you say it to someone who lives in Denver say well, we're the smallest state capital of the Union that might think Well, I've been to small towns and there must not be much to do there But if you sort of switch it up slightly It gives that whole notion of well not only are we this but we're pretty good at what we do as far as being a small town Great, and I share with trip I'm living Delaware now and I was able to work with their capital Dover to Go through a rebranding process and when I came in To be honest the thing that they were using really kind of irritated me because they they proudly Would proclaim that we're the capital of the first state okay, so You infer that by being the first state That that carries with it prominence and then since you're the capital of it That means that you're special But that's kind of a cop out you haven't really said anything You know what are you what do you stand for and that small town? Value that we heard you all say over and over was something that really kind of excited us So I I love how that allows us to kind of spin that message now That really is that city government and what we're going to do from this base Line is we're going to go through and we're going to use a design standard to begin to look at Departmental identities you have some departments that kind of exist under that umbrella Then you have other departments in the city that that are more outreach oriented You have things like the senior center and parks and rec where they might have a little bit of a unique variation all their own but eventually what this is going to grow into is a System that truly connects all those departments within the city Now the next thing that we want to look at though is we talked about this as an organizational logo But if we're going to do that we also need to introduce a Destination logo and for this we're we're creating a Downtown logo and we're using that same silhouette of the dome because it only makes sense I mean it literally is the gold that pops out of the the green that surrounds the Queen Mountain State It is so unbelievably impactful to someone that comes into the community that it makes sense to be the image But what we wanted to do was we wanted to create a graphic variant that that almost changed it up and instantaneously made it not literal We created a multicolor kind of faceted background as the introductory Texture that we put in there and we created a six color palette that were drawn directly from the photos that I took in your downtown So the color palettes are derived from the colors that make up downtown as it is So we see the kind of simple Variation here the nice thing about the word Montpelier and nobody's ever let us change the name So we had to kind of deal with the name as it is But what it does is with this descender of the P it gives us a great space underneath the baseline to put that modifier It also gives us this really nice space between the M and L to kind of drop in that downtown variation We have a horizontal version a stacked vertical version We're showing how we can simplify those down as one color and reversed out versions And then even showing how we're kind of taking this this campaign that trip introduced this concept of Vermont Served daily and that duality of Not only talking about the role that Montpelier plays in serving all the citizens of Vermont But also that platform to be able to talk about the diversity of Experience that you offer up and I'll show you how that kind of materializes here in a second, but from there We need to jump over again to another organizational logo and that is the Montpelier alive logo now Montpelier alive the old logo was very attractive. There wasn't anything wrong with it at all But it did two things first of all it focused purely on literal imagery from downtown had a fork and a spoon and an onion in one had a Clock tower in one, you know, it's a pretty typical imagery that you might see but We don't need the logo of this organization to do the same thing that it was doing before Before not only was it the organizational logo, but it was also the logo that was used to promote downtown We have a replacement for that now. So with the downtown. I mean the Montpelier alive logo We now have the opportunity to really focus on this organizational identity and start to create the sense of an organization This building vitality in the community. So what we did was We wanted to highlight that word alive I'm not sure I've got a second slide that I don't know if I even made it in there But this is where we do have a tagline a dreaded tagline. We actually have two There are two focus statements for this organization The first is enriching life daily and then the second is enhancing business daily So if you serve on the board of this organization Whenever you decide to take your resources and invest them in an activity You can very simply run that through a very quick filter Is it either enriching life or enhancing business or both? Those are the things that we want Montpelier alive to do for this community We really want it to be able to position itself as this economic development entity here in the community So we see this primary logo here where we've used the exact same word type exact same typography We were so unbelievably clever that we could figure out we could put the dome in the a Which all of a sudden just makes it amazing right now. I mean, it's not rocket science, but that consistency Allows you to start to build that identity and that consistent image into all these different identities here over to the side We can even see a version of what a social media icon might look like we've tested it out with a more simplified But still for color logo one color logo black and white reverse Showing how this might look in stationary letterhead business cards being able to convey this really professional bold identity for this organization and then being able to Show how it might make its way into Marketing materials a brochure a guide to downtown things like that now where it gets fun though is when we move into what we call brand extension and brand extension is now that we've got this destination in these organizational identities we start to take it into the events because the events are the ways that our Visitors and our locals truly interact and and they create this really really positive experience but many times we create them in this vacuum so that positive brand equity doesn't actually get Deposited back into the perception of downtown, but stays in a silo of the event itself So what we're going to show here is we're going to show kind of a series of different initiatives and organizations and events We had one we talked with the bike committee and they're like can you do a logo that just says bike Montpelier? Absolutely because of this graphic standard. It makes it unbelievably easy to add and expand the sidewalk sale Again unbelievably clever you can use a dollar sign for an S right You know it was funny I was asking about the old one because the old sidewalk sale logos got balloons and and I just asked Ashley I said so does that mean that like all the people that are participating put Balloons out on the racks on the sidewalk or whatever and she was like Well, I'm not sure about that You know even talking about initiatives like zero waste initiatives being able to tie all of these goals of Different initiatives and connect them together to the same system. We heard about a great Initiative that the parking committee and the biking committee have kind of talked about together and it's called pop Park on the perimeter and again here take a stroll daily This is a way that we can communicate to our own citizens about you know and I will say I'm not sure if you've heard this yet or not but some people in town think Montpelier has a parking problem and And You know we talked about all different variations of that But the big thing that I'll tell you is once I started to dig in with folks and I think Andrew or somebody made a great point. It's like I don't visitors don't really complain about parking because visitors have a higher level of motivation and Yeah, exactly. So, um, you know a lot of times it's those locals. It's the locals that They're in a convenience mindset You know what I need to go where I need to go and get what I need to get and then get on to the next place I need to go to get what I need to get So, you know, all of the vibrancy gets in the way of productivity well, I Really don't think that we want it to be so unbelievably easy that at any point in the day You could be able to park directly in front of the business that you need to go to when you need to go there If that's the case, I'm pretty sure that the vibrancy that we love about downtown Montpellier wouldn't exist But being able to have initiatives where you tie in the pre-existing focus on healthy living Being connected to your community with things like this where just simply enhancing that concept of you know what? Just kind of take a take a stroll Make make a task into something a little bit more enjoyable that couple of extra minutes might actually do you good And then of course if you need to play hardball, you can take the the aerial photo of Berlin Mall and Drop it on top of downtown and show that you know walking from JC Penney to to Walmart is the same distance as going all the way across town But you know people's minds just work different like that. So Again, you've got initiatives like that. You've got consistent ways that you can convey events July 3rd This is probably one of the coolest events that I've ever heard of flannel Friday I absolutely love that. I think you know, so many people lately have so many communities have simply jumped on the American Express Small Business Saturday bandwagon and they have allowed Friday to be given to the major chains and when I heard that concept of flannel Friday I was like that is the absolute Perfect Vermont event like whoever came up with that Get some gold flaky stars because that was that's a really really solid concept Moonlight madness, you know again what we've done is through this typeface the color palette and the approach to graphics We have created an unbelievably simple platform That makes it easy for you to expand So that you're not constantly wasting your precious volunteer resources in committee Discussing what this year's logo is going to look like You know having different I know I say it's just clever, you know I I needed to put the statehouse dome on the end of the the snowflake So, um, but again, you know showing how those things can fit in your arts walk When you have arts oriented events, it's great to connect those arts walk and arts fast a lot of times the arts festival Kind of kicks that off so being able to have very similar approaches to design and creating the sense of series and Connecting those but then all of a sudden what you have is you begin to have a family and that Family begins to connect and it becomes easier and easier for the consumers to connect the dots Now this next slide is kind of a fun one It's just taking a quick look at a signage system I've got a lot more signs to do and most of them have to do with parking But you know what I told folks during this week is you know, typically there's three different parking problems There's parking capacity problem a parking management problem and a parking awareness problem Signage is a great way to address that parking awareness problem So being able to tell people where parking is Consistently share with them where to go, but let me go through this real quick. We'll start over here on this side This is a pole-mounted gateway sign Now typically when we're in a community what we like to do is we like to go and we like to announce Arrival at our corporate limits, so we'll go out to our boundary. We'll put up a gateway sign We're so glad you're here, and we don't say another thing to you Kind of like welcome in somebody at the front door and not telling where the bathroom is so these pole-mounted gateway signs are ways for you to announce arrival at special places This can be district arrivals if you want to start to treat different districts different ways like river street Might have its own kind of unique character as you actually cross the river and begin to enter into downtown You can announce those arrivals through pole-mounted gateways We also have trailblazer signs here We have two different size trailblazer signs and to be honest with you Your community is not going to need any more than two different sizes You're gonna have one that is vehicular oriented and one that is a combination vehicular pedestrian oriented Now typically these have three destinations on them If it is more far more pedestrian oriented you can put more on them But if it's a vehicular oriented based off of the the federal government, they like to keep that to three For the most part signs like this would probably only be seen over on Memorial And then once you take the turn and you kind of get into the downtown core You're gonna see the smaller scale. We have both pediment style and mountable building markers We heard somebody made a comment while we were here. It's like, you know I'm not sure that there's a single sign outside that actually says that this is City Hall So, you know things like that are things that you can kind of consider then also being able to look at informational kiosks informational kiosks are You kind of think about it and I hate to make the the illusion to to the mall But when you walk into a mall one of the first things that you're greeted with is a directory Now the reason that you're greeted with that directory is so that you can know all the things that you might potentially miss out on If you only go to the store that you feel like you parked closest to to get what you need and get out These informational kiosks should be considered at what we call transition points Places where people transition themselves from being vehicular traffic into pedestrians These are great to go in parking lots. They're great ways to welcome people They're great ways to share that information and you know, you get that you've got one of the greatest Information booths of you know any place that I've ever worked. I love the little structure right down there on State Street So, you know being able to share those are really important and then finally Simply showing street banners. I don't want to talk too much about street banners You you've got some really great banners in the community. We've we've seen some really attractive There's one that I saw on State Street yesterday That was just kind of looks sketched and it's got the state house on it and it's got Maybe the woods. It's it's a really cool one on I don't know. I took a picture of it But the thing that I do want to share about street banners is believe it or not street banners are far more than just pretty Street banners can be used very Strategically they can be used to help educate people about how your downtown works They can be used to help connect peripheral parking Into your destination itself They can help to make corridors that people might not necessarily feel comfortable walking down Feel far more friendly. So be very very strategic about those and just remember. They're not just for Aesthetics, they've got some real strategy that can be used a lot of times What we'll do with a community like this is we might use banners in parking areas and actually use those banners to help highlight some of the things that you might experience here and Like for example, I mean you might even be able to get some banners out it at Morse Farm in Their little parking area that highlights some of the things that are in downtown and begin to make connections between Draws to the community and Then from there always like to kind of wrap up on Showing imagery of how you might tell this story and how you might market yourself and this whole concept of you know Vermont served daily. We want to create this platform of all these different things that you can do So being able to kind of have this Interductory add but then immediately kind of moving into this bold Confident look and feel where you can start to connect these dots stunning views color Balance neighbors Trends Heroes serving daily readers It was actually funny after our public meeting We got a an email from one of the participants that said if you want to see the best of Montpellier Vermont, you need to go to the library a little bit after school lets out and Sure enough. I was over there. I was like good gracious. I mean this is a popular place So again, you know being able to show off those amenities. It's one of those things where you have got so many fantastic Offerings to your citizens So what we feel like we've done is with this message with this campaign. We're creating this opportunity to tell Not only tell the the variety and diversity of stories that the community has but also make it unbelievably easy for the business community to incorporate themselves into the message It's very easy for a business owner to figure out what their offering might be And you know, I will say one of the things that was great about this is is typically You know, I have a pretty short window of time to get these photos So I've got about half a day to take photos. I have about a day to do design work And you know, typically I'll I'll do these images and people will be like, oh, those are those are great images Would have been nice if there were some people on the street. It's like well, I don't know if I can fix that that quick here There were people everywhere Typically I'll go through and when I do this I'll shoot to get about 45 or 50 good shots I shot a hundred and sixty-five yesterday and There are people all over them And that was really really great to see and and you know It was one of those things where you could have grabbed any one of those and stuck it on the front of a brochure. So Hopefully we've been talking for right about an hour So we'd like to kind of wrap on our end and kind of turn it over to your end We still got a long list of stuff that we've already identified We've got more events that we want to work on We've got three projects that have been put on hold until this branding Process went through things like shopping and dining brochures for downtown and things like that that we're We're excited to kind of help with help design, but With that we would really love to hear your response and your thoughts Does the strategy seem to make sense? Do you see where the platform allows the community to kind of tell its story? And even if we didn't get to necessarily cover something in one of the ads that we showed tonight It's easy to figure out how those amenities might quickly be rolled in to that exact same format So with that I'm gonna open it up Feel free to ask questions about any or market data or brand statement as well and Tripp and I will just kind of tag team those answers Yes, sir Absolutely, but it's we always try to make it as easy as possible one of the products of this process is going to be a Unified digital resource library that will be made available Directly to the business owner and it will include a style guide document It'll include the typeface and color definitions as well as all the digital resources for all the logo variations So the template that shows if you're going to use your own brand identity as the shopkeeper You know that becomes maybe a prominent placement and then how you use the downtown placement as a secondary And vice versa. I mean it can go both ways depending on how you work with my fear alive or what you want to do on your own But the idea is that you want to be able to have your own identity Incorporated in and that's why part of this design leaves enough space For that other logo that shop logo restaurant logo to go into play as well And as far as regulation on that goes, you know, we have seen communities set up all varying scales to be honest with you over the years the number of Situations where anyone has abused the resources have been Unbelievably minimal in fact I can count them on one hand and the thing that was interesting is in some of those where the abuse Happened the stuff was never even made available publicly. So the abuse happened even though the resource sources weren't accessible So, you know, it's kind of like if somebody's got it in their mind to do something, you know a little sketchy Then they're gonna they're gonna make a way to to do it sketchy But the thing that we really like is like for example a lot of times We urge the community to make them available to the businesses not only to incorporate in their own marketing but to consider creating their own local pride oriented merchandise and And we kind of say it if you as a business owner, let's say that you wanted to make a Shirts or hats or something like that in exchange for that all we would like is we would like Maybe a once a year report on a rough estimate of what you might have sold So what that allows the organization to do is essentially say look we invested this in this process we turned around and made the resources available to the community as a whole and We were able to leverage this in this amount of public sector dollars in that was invested in Private sector dollars invested in marketing and this amount was brought in as actual merchandise sales to the businesses So, you know pretty easy because that's the key We want the business community to see the value in raising the awareness and the connectivity of the community What we're going to end up doing is we actually we have a system that is a a kind of cloud-based system, so it's going to live on Our server so that we're able to share it and it'll never move That's one of the things that's kind of nice about it But then of course we're going to make those links available to Ashley and she'll be able to pass that along to you Important is we sign over our copyright. We release all rights to Anything we've created so if you all would need to modify it tweak it add on to it We're not going to come back and say wait a minute. We've got the creative license on that So we keep it in the cloud just for sake keeping because we have clients from 10 years ago We lost our CD. We need a But yeah, the process itself hopefully what we'll find in terms of next steps is if we don't find a lot of feedback in terms of of tweaks and redesign then our goal is to be able to make the Resources available to Ashley very very quickly and then that link can be distributed through the organization Yes, ma'am Having some signs I've been in other parking lots in the other countries where when you buy your ticket There's a small map that says you are here and then you know what the layout Absolutely, absolutely I like the use of the word served in the in the narrative because it kind of made it feel like there was like a Like a home homey kind of feel to it in a nice way But when I saw the one that said seniors serve daily, I did think that you were Gotcha So it may be some word massaging. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point though We may want you to babysit Seven kids sunny side up No, that is a great point That that is the byproduct of last minute Anything else? Oh, thank you You know the thing that we always like to to share with folks is you know Well, first of all if you were able to meet with us at all I hope that one of the things you take away from this is that we love our work and we take it seriously And we also love Vermont Trim I'm is I think he would move here tomorrow. I think both of us would if we didn't have children at all We might figure out how to meet that. I know it is. I know it is Yes But you know We we feel like there's tremendous power in simplicity and we think that a lot of times what ends up happening is We over complicate things Montpelier is one of the smartest communities I've ever been to the citizens that we met with the grasp that they have on the assets that they have is really really admirable and And there seems to be a hunger Among the people here to see things happen They love where they live and they want it to be a place that they continue to really love They want that fire to burn as bright as it is today and you know So we're we're excited about the recommendations because we feel like there's it's a simple platform to deploy And it's something that can truly build some visual awareness and really kind of create some some you know Connection between dots that sadly people don't necessarily connect on their own Let me talk through some tactical things as this moves ahead Certainly, we're eager for feedback like fixing some grammatical things that don't quite ring true There may be some graphic things that you want us to look at there's some additional items that then needs to develop But we would also encourage you this is one on television and two We are also recording it and we'll put upload it to YouTube so the presentation can be viewed in both formats We really would strongly encourage you particularly those who were not here tonight Oftentimes when they see snippets of something like this they actually don't get the whole breadth of what we were working on Over the past three days So we'd encourage you to send them to see the the video go online or to see the show And and review the presentation here the Q&A because it helps sort of paint the entire picture Because oftentimes the messages that get sent out and snippets only they only tell a little tiny piece of the story Right and we've eaten up an hour and a half of your life that you can't give back those Those suckers that didn't show up tonight Like they don't deserve the same opinion and they got to go through the same work you did it wasn't into the same stuff So but no, I mean it's I agree with what trip said, you know, sadly, I cannot tell you how many times When the recommendations make the rounds through the community with the semi The people that only know part of the story Yeah, I had a couple semi words that I decided not to say but you know what ends up happening is We end up seeing the process grind to a halt and the thing that is so sad is I cannot tell you how many times When it starts to roll back up It rolls with no edits it literally rolls the way that it was recommended and The thing that that kills us about that is what that means is that time that that was spent in This kind of grinding to a halt was time. We weren't implementing It's time wasted with resources that didn't end up getting honed. We're all for refinements We actually you know being able to kind of hear the level of things that you honed in on tonight Makes us feel fantastic because if you're sitting there calling out headlines that didn't feel exactly right That means that you're not sitting there saying I think you guys are idiots So that's a that's a pretty good win for us We all thank you so much yeah Thank you Statement Thank you so much So good on you. And the second thing is that I want to remind everybody this is this is because of DID right here This would not have happened without our downtown Help with that and thank you to Montpelier alive Pleasure, I know we'll be back even if not on business we'll be back on pleasure Yeah All right, we don't want to stand between you and dinner any longer. Thank you so much for coming out Thanks for your time this evening and we look out for this link. We'll get it over to Ashley ASAP so you can pull it off I