Tulsa needs to advertise- to itself!!!!

[perspicuity85]

Please see the topic "Guide to Tulsa-2010."  I have posted an outline of a proposed brochure that details Tulsa's geographic regions and main attractions.

[TheArtist]

Stole this from a "different" forum,,,,

This is a very good article--  Hope you enjoy the read--

Discovering Tulsa All Over Again

Islands, arenas and a 21-story Native American statue, oh my!

It's no secret that Tulsa is struggling to redefine itself.

For the past 19 months, the Tulsa Convention and Visitors Bureau has been working with Littlefield Inc., a group of local experts on branding, to learn what Tulsa has become and how the city can flaunt that identity to bring in tourists and their pocketbooks.

Efforts have been focused so as to have marketing material ready for the high-visibility events soon to take place in Tulsa, such as the 2007 PGA Championship.

"If you're going to be a true destination, you want to find the one thing that the community can hang its hat on," said David Littlefield, founder and CEO of Littlefield Inc., 1350 S. Boulder Ave., Ste. 500. "We want to make a promise to visitors so that when they come here, we can deliver on that promise."

Littlefield Inc. won the bid to perform the research on how both residents and non-residents view Tulsa. Littlefield Inc. used a combination of web and telephone surveys, combined with interviews and city tours, to learn how Tulsans perceive themselves, as well as what outsiders think of Tulsa.

The results gathered from over 900 respondents were eye-opening.

When asked what is the first thing that comes to mind at the mention of Tulsa, 34 percent of 750 survey respondents from Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana said simply that they did not know. Five percent thought of oil and only 3 percent thought of a big city populated by many people.

The news gets worse: when event planners from across the country were asked what they knew about Tulsa, 76 percent said they knew nothing at all. Only 4 percent had seen ads for Tulsa, and 4 percent more thought Tulsa too small for their conventions.

And to make this story even better --

As the research from Littlefield Inc. revealed Tulsans have little confidence in their community's ability to draw tourists, Stewart said the first order of business in branding Tulsa as a tourist destination is to work on "internal marketing."





You know what I sense underlying a lot of this "lack of advertising" to itself and to others about Tulsa and the people who decide to do the advertising?  

FEAR

Fear that we can't really pull it off.  And as things stand now, they are right, we can't.

Tulsa has beautiful buildings, a cathedral, and churches downtown....  But the downtown is dead and you can't reliably tour these building, they are usually closed. Philbrook, The Garden Center, Tulsa historical society, rosegarden, Utica Square, Woodward Park, and the old neighborhoods around them, are the anchors for a great cultural tourism stop.  But other than Philbrook, the rest aren't geared for tourists.  Garden center baadly needs some gardening around it, there is compacted bare dirt and badly kept bushes around it all the time and the interior needs some sprucing up and the North addition needs to be completely torn down and a classical grand ballroom/show room/meeting room/wedding room, needs to be built instead with perhaps a small ice cream parlor type shop by it so people visiting all the things around can have a that "touristy" enjoyable experience.  The historic society needs to get funds to remodel the old mansion so people can actually go in it etc.

The last place I visited I PAID to go look inside a church that wasn't half as nice as either the Holy Family, First Presbyterian, Boston Avenue or the First Methodist!  Then paid to pack onto a trolly and go to another church having a real square with the obligatory fountain and park, and it wasn't all that nice either.   Then ya get back home and its next to impossible to get inside the ones here, half an hour after service is over. They are empty and locked. I actually got locked inside one a while back while I was taking pics lol.

In other words we have GREAT potential that could be had with a relative modicum of funds and effort applied to making the things we have actual attractions.  The Cathedral Square idea being the biggest of those I can think of. We don't nurture our potential.  Yet here we are going to spend money, time and effort building a park downtown where? And what good is this park going to do there?  What synergy a park and a fountain could have had in front of Holy Family and it would be nearer to places like the Mayo District and its budding shops, coffee shops, and hoped for galleries.    

Whenever people come across my photos of Tulsa, the thing I get the most is    "WOW, thats Tulsa?!" "I am going to have to go there, its not at all what I thought, its got some beautiful things."    http://www.flickr.com/photos/williamtheartist/

But as soon as I hear that they are actually making a tripng to check out the city.  A little bit of dread pops up, that FEAR I spoke of earlier.  Because even though we have these great things, we and this city just do not utilize or nurture them as any other city would.

We don't do things to promote tourism, as in, not just getting people here but we don't set up the conditions for people to do the normal touristy things when they are here.  Its like the park is open and the rides are there, but there is no one at the gate to greet you, there aren't any maps to show you where the attractions are and what there is to do, no food courts, hot dog stands, or restrooms at those rides and no touristy transportation to get you from one part of the park to the next, and the rides themselves aren't even running.  Everything is just standing there, looking like a great park, but without any people around to run it.

Other cities spend fortunes to build attractions and then promote them and nurture them.  Most of the big expenses and "rides" were set up for us a long time ago by some great people.  We have so much, looking us right in the face, wasted wasted potential.

[waterboy]

Originally posted by TheArtist


[/quote

You're preaching to the saved Artist! My business drew most of its support from OUTSIDE the city. People were desperate to find interesting things to do here and I struggled to direct them. Yet, I was constantly reminded by locals that Tulsa is not, and cannot be a tourist draw.

It is circular causation mixed with low expectations and it is systemic. At least three factors are at play here that frustrate the development of the kind of tourist facilities one would expect in a city this size.
  1. People here aren't so sure they want to encourage tourism. This stems from...
  2. Not having a clear definition of what tourism is and how it breathes new capital into a community. They see communities that are overly dependent and commercialized by tourism trade like Branson, Arlington, etc. and they fear what it would do to our city. They also see tourism very narrowly, in a vacationing Disney sort of way, rather than the larger scope of family, business, research and government visits.
  3. PROTECTIONISM- Nearly impossible to start a tour bus. If you were able to make it through the barbed wire of insurance, govt regs, and capital formation you would face local lobbying efforts by existing taxi, limousine, public and private transit companies. All this, so you could face a public that (refer to #1) isn't prepared to serve the tourist.

I could add number 4 which would be a what I percieved as a rather strong bias among opinion leaders that tourism would cheapen our image. I doubt we could arrive at a consensus as to what cultural neighborhood entities exist.

After reading my post it looks somewhat critical. Just want to point out from my experience what the core of the problem seems to be. I am not so insightful as to how it could be changed but I suspect that if one tourist type venture were to visibly succeed here, there would be a paradigm shift. In OKC that was the Murrah memorial and Bricktown.

[tim huntzinger]

Howzabout we declare 'eminent domain name' and snag tulsa.com from its current state of suckiness?

[perspicuity85]

^^
The Littlefield study should be very eye-opening for city leaders.  

Rather than fear, I think the two main factors contributing to Tulsa's lack of self-promotion are lack of knowledge and lack of leadership.  Citizens of Tulsa really don't know much about their own city.  And that isn't just because Tulsa is full of ignorant rednecks, as some will have us believe.  The C&V Bureau has failed to effectively market the city's assets to people who do not pass by these assets on a daily basis.  They have taken Tulsa's citizens for granted, and have not responded to the population and demographic shifts that have occurred in Tulsa in the past 25 years.  The urban core can say: f*** the 'burbs all they want, but from a business standpoint, that's like saying: f*** our customers!  The urban core and the suburban areas depend on each other for  economic vitality.  We can build a thousand East Ends, but none of them will ever realize their full potential if the only people that know of their existence are in Midtown.  Not to toot my own horn, but the outline of my Guide to Tulsa provides more information about Tulsa than anything found in local malls, the airport, or any place in the city with high pedestrian traffic.  That took 20 minutes at most to create.  It's time for TulsaNow or some organization to take action on this issue.  I would really like to develop my Guide into a true marketing tool; or else help someone with a better marketing idea.  I'm sure someone with a marketing degree out there can think of something creative.  Anyone care to look into this?  Artist, I know you expressed interest...

[TheArtist]

Aha! just when I was wondering what I was going to do with two whole days of being holed up at home.  I will start on that little map thingey I was thinking of. []