Deck the Poles - Yuletide in Goodwood

Not exactly dazzling. Not exactly marketing.

The 2016 street Christmas Decorations, sponsored by the Goodwood Road Business Association (GRBA). Okay they were made by kids. Nobody wants to be unkind to kids. But what the kids made is not the point. The point is that the GRBA's budget of over $70,000 comes largely from a Marketing Levy imposed on businesses. Is this Marketing? Is it screaming at you of festivity, lavish spending and bustling excitement?

And further - why would anyone give a task as important as marketing business to children?

We gather that a "community artist" was engaged at the GRBA's expense to work with school children to execute "artworks" on the chain wire fence of Goodwood Primary that faces Goodwood Road. The Chair of the GRBA says the project is "ongoing" which suggests a continuing drain on the group's resources. Only a small part of the GRBA's funds is actually spent on marketing, often promoting a handful of individual businesses. A whopping 40% goes on administration while an unspecified amount goes on community development projects like the Goodwood Primary School fence. 



 

When Flattery Fails or Perhaps Was Never Attempted

Well organised, leadership qualities, articulate?

I hope this is not a sign of things to come. The 2016-17 Committee of the GRBA had its first meeting last month and was unable to elect a Secretary, Treasurer or Deputy Chair. Now come on, guys and gals, this is not trying hard enough. You should be able to flatter someone into accepting the positions!

Not only was the Committee unable to elect a full complement of office bearers, they didn't make any plan to address the situation either. In case the members are not sufficiently familiar with the responsibilities of running an Incorporated Association, I am going to offer them my unsolicited advice. This is what you do:

• You call a Special General Meeting
• You tell the members that it has not been possible to form a proper Committee because no one wants to accept these offices.
• You ask the members to elect a new Committee that includes people who are willing to hold the offices
• If that doesn't work, you are in deep merde and should contact Consumer and Business Services

You do not bungle along without a Deputy Chair, Treasurer or Secretary. They are required.

Way Over the Top

In Getting The Most of The Pie I demonstrated how the GRBA's Facebook page leans toward favoritism, showcasing a mere handful of its members, over and again, while neglecting most others. I identified a Top Five who are the beneficiaries of this bias. Well, things just went way over the top. In just a few days, one of those traders was the sole subject of five posts, four publicising its campaign to raise funds for charity by donating all the proceeds of coffee sales on a particular day. The fifth was a re-posting of a favourable online review.

Raising funds for charity is great. If you want to publicise your charitable fundraising as a way of attracting customers, that's fine. You are entitled to be competitive. But the Goodwood Road Business Association has a responsibility to not one, but ALL of the cafes within its bounds. It does not do for an organisation obligated to all of them to beg the public to get their coffee at this one, favoured, cafe. It is not the role of a business association to divert custom away from any of its members. It's a betrayal. It destroys trust.

Favoritism not only breeds resentment, it makes everyone worry about whether its okay to criticize the organisation or its office-bearers; whether there's a price to be paid; whether you'll get pushed even further down the list of favourites and your turn to shine will never come. The result? Silence. Stultification. Lacklustre performance. The organisation gets an exaggerated idea of its overall success and its level of acceptance because no one's prepared to say what they really think.

We traders pay a compulsory levy and we would all like our share of the benefits. It looks particularly bad when a recipient of this sort of disproportionate exposure is on the Committee of the GRBA. 

Down the Black Hole

A month has passed since Goodwood Road got a mention on "South Aussie With Cosi" and I guess you're all raking in the extra cash. No? Neither am I. Nor have I benefited from the feature in the pretentious CityMag online shopping directory.* And not one customer has burst in the door saying how irresistible is their urge to shop after seeing the decorated Primary School Fence. Which prompts me to ask; how much of our money was spent on these promotions, and why hasn't anyone noticed that it's vanished down a black hole?

The GRBA's Annual Report and Financial Statement for last year are out, but they are less than transparent on this subject. They speak mysteriously of "Digital Economy Strategy" and "Streetscape Activation". Would someone please tell me plainly:

• How much was spent on the article in CityMag that did not mention my business once, not even in small print? *
• How much did the gig on "South Aussie With Cosi" set us back?
• How much was spent on decorating the Primary School Fence ?
• Why was anything at all spent on decorating the Primary School Fence?
• How much was lost on the flopped "Goodwood Groove"?
• What was the $13,000+ "Advertising" money actually spent on? 
• Did anyone test whether any of these outlays actually brought us customers?
• Does anyone care? 

One thing was clear in the financial report - administration costs were 44% of income. 44% of income! !!!!!!!!. (That's a whole sentence of exclamation marks.) How can this phony business association possibly be a good idea when nearly half its income goes on admin! If you're smarter than me and you can make any of this seem rational, please explain it in the comments below.

*citymag.indaily.com.au/?s=Goodwood/ 

Getting The Most of The Pie

There have been rumbles of discontent in the Precinct. I've heard angry whispers. Tears have been shed. The story I've heard is that particular businesses have been receiving favourable treatment.

When I hear stories like this, it is not my habit to swallow them whole. I like to check the facts, see if there is any substance.

So I did a quick survey of the GRBA's "Goodwood Road" Facebook page http://facebook.com/GoodwoodAlive/ to see if anyone was getting more than their fair share of promotion. The GRBA's Co-ordinator posts on the page several times a week. To get an idea whether certain businesses were in fact getting disproportionate exposure, I looked at 40 consecutive posts. 

 34 businesses were mentioned. There are around 80 businesses in the Precinct: 21 were mentioned only once, 13 were mentioned more than once, while around 46 were not mentioned at all. Of those mentioned more than once, 8 were mentioned twice, while a lucky handful were mentioned multiple times. These were: The Capri Theatre (6 mentions), Two Sisters Food and Wine Bar (5 mentions), The Boulangerie (4 mentions), Trouble and Strife (4 mentions) and The Community Centre (not a business) (4 mentions).

Let's call these fortunate establishments the Top Five. They got 38% of the 60 business mentions. Not exactly even-handed.

"Others" includes 29 businesses mentioned either once or twice. So 15% of the businesses got 38% of the mentions.

It gets even more disproportionate when you look at how often the Top Five were the sole subject of a post. (Some posts mention more than one business, others feature one business only. These figures are about the latter.) The Boulangerie (3 sole mentions), The Capri Theatre (4 sole mentions), Two Sisters Food and Wine Bar, (1 sole mention), Trouble and Strife (2 sole mentions).

Of the posts mentioning one business only, 45% were of the Top Five, amply supporting the rumours of favourable treatment.

There were 22 sole mentions: 10 of these were about the Top 5.

Other biases in evidence: 57% of mentions were cafes/restaurants/eateries and regrettably you were far more likely to get a mention if you were of white anglo extraction rather than Asian. Only one Asian eatery got a sole mention. An astonishing nine were lumped together in one post. 

I was sad to discover that, in this sample at least, people's suspicions were true. The businesses they suspected of getting favourable treatment are indeed getting it. I'm not saying it's intentional. It may be quite unintentional. But it's happening. And it isn't fair.



 

If You Like Purple

"Don't go to the cafe right beside you.
Just keep walking."

A brightly coloured map board right outside the Kazbah cafe on Goodwood Road invites visitors to go on a "two to ten minute walk" to cafes further down the road for their coffee and meal. There's been an eatery at this address for at least five years, so there's really no excuse for this in 2016. If I was the owner of Kazbah I would be fuming. These no doubt expensive map boards are out of date. Are there any plans to update them, or are they just going to get more and more irrelevant?

Mind you, before visitors can be led away to your competitors, they first have to be lured to visit Goodwood. That's another thing the GRBA* could usefully spend its money on: turning this stretch of road into a destination, somewhere people go to spend a couple of hours. Then the boards might have a useful purpose. Otherwise all we've got is an expensive purple thing blocking your view of the traffic. Oh well, I guess you could say it's vibrant. If you like purple.

Map Boards guide invisible tourists
to highlights of Goodwood.

*Goodwood Road Business Association

The School Fence as Promotional Opportunity

$50,000 a year should be enough to do a couple of worthwhile things to promote Goodwood Road as a destination. Maybe an ad on the back of a bus. A brochure to go in hotel lobbies. Maybe light up the street trees with fairy lights. Even in better economic times, few businesses in the so-called Goodwood Road Precinct could survive on local patronage alone, so any worthwhile promotion would aim to draw people here from all of greater Adelaide. Plus, we're on the doorstep of the CBD, which at certain times is awash with interstate visitors. Surely $50,000 could be fruitfully spent to draw people here? You would think so. And it might be if it were not for this one handicap built into the GRBA*. It is required to "involve the community"! No kidding. It says that in the GRBA Constitution, the one that was written by Unley Council.

Now I for one would love to involve the community in my business: I would like them to be my customers, and I'm happy to involve people from all over Adelaide in that role, not just Goodwood people. I am not, however, a person trained in community development. That's not what I do. I'm a bookseller. Further, I do not want my hard-earned rates handed over to a gang of well-meaning but unskilled volunteers so they can spend it, at will, on whatever they think might be business-promotiony-cum-community-developmenty things. They are retailers. They are restaurateurs. They are bakers. They are hairdressers. They are not community development experts.

Maybe Council have more sense than I'm crediting them with. Maybe they never intended  GRBA to give more than a passing glance toward "involving the community". If so, then someone should tell the GRBA, because marrying the interests of community development and business promotion together is a difficult task and there have to be better things they can do with the money than decorating a school fence. You'd be hard pressed to convince me that was doing anything to advance the interests of my business. Anything at all. Ever.


*Goodwood Road Business Association

Leg-tied to a Lame Duck

Traders in the Goodwood Road Precinct have been effectively baled up and held captive by Unley Council and its offshoot, the Goodwood Road Business Association. This is how it works.

 Unley Council collects a compulsory levy from us via our rates* and in return we can, if we choose, be members of the Business Association. Sounds fine, doesn't it, until you realize this is not a real business association. It was set up by Council for its own purposes. They even wrote the constitution. 

A major role of a business association, you would think, is to advocate on behalf of its members, but not this one. If you've ever approached the Association with an issue such as disruption caused by the Council's streetscaping project, you would have been told this is not the concern of the Association - and that's correct. It isn't. The GRBA has no lobbying role. You could argue that this is pretty convenient for Unley Council.

From a trader's point of view the GRBA is a lame duck, and one we are leg-tied to because they've got our money.

Some $50,000 a year!

"But" I hear you say, "They are there to promote business. That has to be good for traders."

Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you?



*City of Unley Business Plan Summary 2015-16 : "A separate rate is levied against certain commercial properties along Unley, King William, Goodwood, Fullarton and Glen Osmond Roads. The Council has determined to raise a separate rate, for the purposes of the promotion of the business and traders located along major shopping strips."