If Memphis was an actor, it would be looking to be cast against type.
Memphis is like the actor who has only played light comedy roles and takes on a casting call as a serial killer just to shake up his image and how the public sees him.
Memphis needs to do the same thing. We need an intervention to break our addiction to Elvis Presley as all things Memphis. Just under 50 percent of all Americans have been born since the King died, including the all-important 25-34 year-old demographic, and yet, we include references to Elvis in marketing without any link to how he has relevance to who we are now and who we want to be.
Graceland seems to understand that its product needs refreshing and that’s why it’s planning to spend $120-130 million. But when it comes to our city’s marketing, we tend to soldier on as if Elvis might hold a concert at FedExForum any day now. Slowly things are changing, but they can’t change fast enough, because if we are to reposition Memphis to attract and keep the workers we need to compete in today’s highly complicated, competitive world, we’ve got to shake off Elvis, images of riverboats and commentaries that perpetuate our stereotypes as a stuck-in-time, slow-moving city.
Authentic and Now
It’s why we’ve always admired the work of Christopher Reyes and Sarah Fleming. On so many fronts, they were working to give the Memphis image a make-over with their high-energy artistic vignettes and the message that our best music and art are being made right now.
It directly responds to the need for Memphis to be cast against type. It tells the rest of the world that everything that it thinks about our city is wrong: We are not stuck in time, we have an undercurrent of artistic creativity as steady as the Mississippi River, we have an emerging group of young leaders ready to take center stage, we have a core of innovative thinkers who are looking at old problems in new ways, and we are in fact inventing ourselves little by little, almost without noticing.
Despite the tendency to see our image problems as just a marketing challenge to be solved, our task isn’t just to tell our story better. More fundamentally, we need to have a better (and different) story to tell. And it needs to be a story against type.
We have a modest proposal. If we were in charge of developing the message about Memphis, we would walk straight at the fact that we’re a majority minority region instead of the self-conscious way that we often act like no one will notice. If competitive advantage comes from differentiation, it is in Memphis’s best interest to embrace its diversity and set out to be a national hub of African-American talent.
For decades, Atlanta’s economic engine was fueled with most of the African American talent in Southeast U.S., and Memphis, which should be a hub for this talent, seems afraid to put it squarely on our agenda. To make matters worse, we not only aren’t attracting African-American talent. We are actually losing the very same talent we need to keep here.
We could deliver a message against type by spotlighting one of our city’s most dynamic citizens and the force behind one of our most important success stories, Hattiloo Theatre in Overton Square, one of a handful of black repertory theaters in the entire country. Rather than spend millions of dollars in ads aimed at companies, we should instead spend hundreds of thousands of dollars telling the nation that we have a vibrant black arts scene, incredible young African American leadership, and the opportunity to make a difference.
It’s the Talent, Stupid
While we will undoubtedly continue to target companies, it’s worth remembering that it’s talent that draws business investment these days and smart people are moving where other smart people are. Young college-educated talent is moving to cities that are clean, vibrant, green, safe, tolerant, and entrepreneurial, and if we’re not fighting for our share of these workers, we’re in trouble, and if we’re looking to where our greatest competitive advantage lies, it should be with African-American talent.
If we were in charge, we’d put Ekundayo Bandele and Hattiloo Theatre on the road, visiting colleges and universities to demonstrate clearly that we’re not our grandfather’s city. Nothing delivers this message stronger than a road company of our outstanding black rep theater. Most of all, if you want to send a message about a new Memphis, its energy and its creative culture, there’s no one better than Mr. Bandele who is the literal and symbolic model of it and the most articulate advocate for a new Memphis.
Those are precisely the qualities that he brings to work each day as founder and creative director of Hattiloo Theatre.
“I wanted to create a black venue that all Memphians can own,” Mr. Bandele said. “But we also want to give black Memphians pride that emboldens them to get the theater bug and to use Hattiloo as a passport to explore all of the Memphis I love and to expand the cultural boundaries of children. I want the black community, especially entrepreneurs, to get more active so our kids don’t have to go to Atlanta to succeed.”
A Better Message
His personal story and the story of Hattiloo Theatre is a persuasive one. He was operating a business, organizing an in-the-round performance space called the Curtain Theater and later Speakeasy – a rotating group of poets, musicians, comedians, and actors that performed weekly at the Jack Robinson Gallery in South Main Historic District and attracted some of the most diverse audiences in Memphis, when somewhere along the way, someone asked him, “’Why don’t you open a black theater?’ I said no. I had a lot going on. Someone asked, ‘What would you call it?’ I was just daydreaming. I said Hattiloo for my daughters.”
Fateful meetings with leaders in the local art community propelled the idea, and when his nonprofit status was approved by the Internal Revenue Service in three weeks rather than the projected 18 months, it seemed providential. There was little doubt that Hattiloo Theatre was meant to be, and his daughters, Hatshepsut (Hatti) and Oluremi (Lou), did in fact give their names to their father’s new venture.
Inspired as a student in New York City by authors as varied as William Faulkner and Richard Wright, Mr. Bandele became a writer, and while a student at Tennessee State University, a professor suggested that he should write plays because of his skill with dialogue. Visiting an aunt in Memphis, he helped out as a stage hand in a play in which she was performing and it all became real for him.
Mr. Bandele brings his playwright’s eye to his new hometown. “What I’m learning in Memphis is the dynamics of race and the desire for the black community to be more involved culturally, politically, and business wise. The black community here is different than any black community I’d experienced. While Memphis has a microcosm of mistrust, one on one it doesn’t exist. The heart of Memphis is so big and it’s open. What I’m finding is that no one has taken the time to find the connection and the common bonds, like what do two Memphians meeting in Brooklyn talk about? That’s what I want us all to discover.”
Act with Innovation
If his goal for his art can be summed up in sentence, it is in its ability to help people define themselves. “I’m self-possessed,” Mr. Bandele said. “I’m a black man with an African name from the black community with a black theater, but a majority of my personal life is white. What is personal to you is your identity. You don’t have to wear it on your sleeve.
“I can empathize with anybody. I can understand both sides. I don’t believe that you can be divisive in Memphis and be a leader. Another thing is that you have to have a clear vision. When I was in college, I knew that I was a writer. I knew my path. My vision is that I can go to Klondike School and they will say that they can be a theater executive director, a business owner, an accountant, a CFO. When we expand the cultural boundaries of a child, we know they can be whatever they want to be.”
When asked what advice he can give young leaders as a result of his Memphis experiences, he said: “Learn from the past. Learn from those who lived it, shaped it, or survived it. Seek out those who have done aspects of what you want to accomplish, and sit down and listen to their story and ask for their advice. And then act with innovation and courage. Failure is but an opportunity to learn how not to do something.”
Amplifying his story and giving him a megaphone to talk about the Memphis he sees not only gives us the chance to be cast against type, but to powerfully position us with young, college-educated people who are deciding where they want to live and work.
Originally posted June 29, 2011
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We had to simply laugh when reading about the amateur antics of Kevin Kane and his crew to “market” Memphis to young professionals at bars in New York City.
Trying to “sell” a third tier city like Memphis is a tall order. Do they really think that bar hopping and handing out Bluff City Bling is gonna cut it in NYC?
So amateur, so desperate, but so very Memphis!
It’s the Greater Memphis Chamber and Choose 901 that are selling Memphis to millennials in Manhattan, not Convention and Visitors Bureau. Cities all over the U.S. are involved in similar campaigns to attract young, talented workers to their cities.
As for Kevin Kane and CVB, their tourism marketing analytics shows great success in selling Memphis to New Yorkers and elsewhere.
NY, Atlanta, LA, etc. don’t sell themselves by hitting the road. They sell themselves through word-of-mouth, through doing and being, excellent, engaging, exemplary, exotic at times, irresistible.
Memphis will sell itself better by making itself better, and you have expressed the most obvious and important parts of the changes that could and should be made to capitalize on its current uniqueness and possible strengths.
Rather than putting Hattiloo on the road at this time, why not just continue to help its director, staff, and board strengthen its mission within Memphis? Why not expand and strengthen the current-day music and visual arts throughout Memphis? The city has a major self esteem problem for complex and ongoing reasons. All the more reason to first sell the city to ourselves. Are Memphians good salesmen for the city? Do they know all the good that is happening right here, right now beyond Elvis and Beale?
When we can speak to each other about what we have and what we love and what we would like to see and experience more of, then we as a city would be ready to be cast in a new role, one more befitting our best dreams for the future.
Those world cities don’t have to sell themselves to millennials or anyone else because they are magnets. (It is interesting that Atlanta is wringing its hands about its dropoff in college-educated young people moving there.) But there a number of cities the size of Memphis that are on the road touting themselves. And you’re so right – with millennials, the endorsement that matters the most is word of mouth from their peer group.
As for Hattiloo, we weren’t suggesting an either – or but both. We agree with all of your ideas of expanding the reach and impact of this extraordinary cultural asset inside Memphis as well as it being a cultural beacon that we share with others.
Thanks for your great comments.
I think Memphis is a big enough town that it can do affordable, strategic road shows while also continuing to put its best feet forward at home. To argue that one must just do one or the other is pure folly.
I do have to take issue with the statement that Graceland is planning to spend $120-130 million to refresh its product. From all hazy news accounts, $75 million of that investment is Memphis taxpayer money that was extremely quickly and quietly railroaded to a wealthy, out of town corporation last fall to build Graceland a new hotel (Methinks this is one of the many/major reasons Mayor Wharton will soon be called just Mr. Wharton). So, actually, taxpayers are spending $75 million and Graceland is filling in the rest.
Hopefully, our new Mayor will clawback that money as one of the first items on his to-do list in January. Despite Mr. Strickland’s ill-advised vote for it while on the City Council, clawing back this huge amount of money will prove that he is truly going to reduce the corporate giveaways from taxpayers. Graceland is a welfare queen taking from a very poor city, and their inability to compete on a level playing field with other hotel operators in this marketplace is no reason for taxpayers to buy them a shiny new hotel complex. There are plenty of other hoteliers in the area as well as all over the city that do not get their hotels paid for with taxpayer largesse.
I agree with Sherman about Graceland being a tax welfare queen sucking our poor city dry. I really doubt the new development in that highly undesirable part of town will spread and help the larger city. Corporate welfare plain and simple.
Also agree wholeheartedly about these Chamber junket trips to recruit young professionals here. That sort of activity is just a week long boondoggle to NY for staff and I’m sure the millennials have a good laugh at Memphis expense.
The success stories coming from people like Ekundayo Bandele provides some of the best marketing we could ask for. Come to our city, work hard and you can realize your dreams while transforming the community associated with your work. We need more of these types of stories that will travel far and wide via word of mouth. Imagine if Sarah and Christopher and John Kirksey (Memphis Art Park) and Lisa Williamson (Junkyard Memphis) had similar success narratives that they could tell to friends in other cities.
Cynthia-
As a professional that moved here from NYC not so long ago, I can tell you that the millennials are not going to “have a good laugh at Memphis expense”. I am also a millennial- in fact, based on my year and month of birth I am one of the first millennials. But more important than my age, listening to the broad characterizations regarding this generation is akin to reading my own biography.
That said, people do listen and people will talk. While no one is likely to drop their lease and hire a moving truck the day after hearing the “gospel” about Memphis, it may pique their interest enough to begin their own research into the possibilities offered within the 901. After all, word of mouth starts with a single experience of one individual. One of the most important traits of this demographic group is that they are keenly interested in applying their passion and interests towards ideas, efforts and projects that are both bigger than themselves while also at a scale where their individual contribution actually matters. They want whatever it is they do (be it volunteer efforts in the neighborhood to their actual career) to have a positive and lasting effect on their community. While income is important, they are far more likely than previous generations to reject higher paying employment offers in favor of those where the workplace culture is a better fit and where their efforts in the office translate to a more fulfilling experience after 5 p.m. and in the world beyond their office. That is perhaps the greatest local attribute one could sell to this coveted generation as Memphis has the potential to offer such opportunities in spades. A key to developing said potential will be ensuring that the “local soil” is as amenable as possible to new ideas and new blood. This demographic is highly sought in every city so sending an e-card will go unnoticed. However, if Memphis can show that the local scene possesses the characteristics that millennials are seeking, that their ideas will not be merely tolerated but will be celebrated, and that their efforts will not occur in a vacuum but will be actively supported physically, financially and spiritually, then this city (or any city that could achieve coordinating such a feat) will be inundated with 21-35 year-old, college educated individuals and families.
The Chamber and 901 may not be returning with tens of thousands of moving trucks on their heels, but their efforts will be just as effective as those being produced by other cities (and likely less costly) such as yet another generic website from anywhere U.S.A with the same pictures (and regurgitated one-line descriptions) of an arts festival in a street, a diverse group of giddy college-age kids in front of a food truck, someone playing an instrument in a “music venue”, a group of 5 “business people” shaking hands, and/or an arena/stadium filled with cheering fans.
Urbanut or Smart City:
Do you know if Chamber sent millennials or oldsters to NYC? Would either make a difference in success rate? How many males and females were sent? Gay and straight? Black and white?
I’m trying to imagine how contacts are made in bars. Does a pair, a male and a female, go into a bar and split up to hit on the opposite gender or maybe the same gender? Gays are quite talented more often than not and they are really good at fixing up worn out houses to sustain neighborhoods.
Is Memphis tolerant enough for millennials?
I was reading this article and then the comments. I tend to agree with Hasava in wondering if Memphis is tolerant enough for millennials, especially gays. Memphis is not really even on the radar for most gays and a lot of that has to do with the large African American population and the general dislike and disdain many blacks (led by black churches) have toward gays and lesbians. Our son is gay and moved away from here right after college. He and his friends say that Memphis is definitely not a welcoming city for gays. Other cities benefit greatly by embracing LBGT culture but that is just not going to happen here.
Tom Jones, it would be interesting if you did a piece about this issue of the gay community in Memphis. I happen up agree that Memphis in general is not very welcoming of gays. Is it the black churches and the general intolerance and view that LGBT life should be only on the “down low” here? I know that when compared to a lot of other cities Memphis is indeed not very gay friendly. This hold us back because gays and their creative energies are vital to building diverse cities. No so here and that’s not a good thing. Thanks, Ryan
I got a job here a year ago after college. Hate to rain on the parade but I cannot wait to leave. Two words sum up Memphis for me and my crowd. Those two words are Backward & Boring
Madrigal |ˈmadrigəl|
noun
a part-song for several voices, esp. one of the Renaissance period, typically arranged in elaborate counterpoint and without instrumental accompaniment. Originally used of a genre of 14th-century Italian songs, the term now usually refers to English or Italian songs of the late 16th and early 17th c., in a free style strongly influenced by the text.
Memphis is backward but I don’t think it’s boring. You and your “crowd” can make Memphis what you want it to be. Yes, other cities are already “there”, but in Memphis you can really make a difference. I assume you are not a Desotoite but are an urbanite. March on!
FH-
I am completely ignorant regarding 901 or the Chamber’s plan for implementing their approach. The allusion to a typical bar pick-up scene did make me grin. You could imagine how that might go: “You must be from Memphis, because you are the only TEN I SEE. But seriously…”.
My post was more in response to the somewhat knee-jerk reaction to the concept of the effort. As a concept, traveling to Manhattan and Brooklyn to sell the attributes of the city is not a bad idea. As with all else, “an idea can be as flawless as can be, but its execution will always be full of mistakes”.
We’ve written before about how LGTB Memphians are our canaries in the coal mine when it comes to our tolerance. Young, talented workers are looking for places where smart people already live and where they can live however they want to live. (Interestingly, in a recent national poll, Memphis was seen by young workers as such a place.) Tolerance is a competitive advantage and if we want to see if we are succeeding in creating such an environment, we should ask citizens trying to live LGTB lives here.
http://smartcitymemphis.blogspot.com/2006/11/tolerance-is-competitive-advantage.html
Geez…,the article cited is from 2006 and the world has changed for LGBT communities. Memphis seems to be unaware of this seismic shift. Maybe it’s time to put a spotlight on this issue. The points about black churches being bigoted against gay is a valid one.
I’m gay, out (of the coal mine) and proud. Believe me Memphis in 2015 has tremendous prejudice and hostility against gays, even in supposedly progressive midtown where we live. This is not a welcoming city for gays that is yet another huge barrier to improving this city.
Memphis remains toxic for LGBT people. The causes and effects are too numerous to mention but I do not blame our church going African American population.
Atlanta has been a both a thriving LGBT community and a African American religious population.
Attitudes in Atlanta changed (in the 70’s!) when well educated and economically advantaged urban dwellers and local corporations decided to change the culture. African American mayors have often been the biggest proponents of inclusive legislation but they have been able to act only when they had the support of local big business.
This is NOT true in Memphis. FedEx has a long history of dragging its feet on gay issues, AutoZone ranks poorly in the HRC gay friendly ratings. Memphis lacks any progressive corporate voice pushing for inclusion.
Trust me, this is the number one reason that Memphis remains toxic for LGBT people.
Madrigal – The 2006 article was just a point of reference. We’ve been writing about tolerance and gay rights for years and we’ll continue to do so. It is time to get serious about this issue and for our political and corporate leaders to get out of the closet and lead on it.
Thanks, Peter, for reminding how far we have to go.
We welcome anyone who would like to write about their personal experiences so that we could post here.
Once again the HRC ranks Memphis based corporations as not welcoming to LGBT employees. Most are indifferent but AutoZone appears to be downright hostile:
http://www.memphisflyer.com/MemphisGaydar/archives/2015/11/18/memphis-law-firm-gets-perfect-score-in-equality-index-autozone-scores-low