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. 



 

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