Welcome back to another episode of Less People, I’m Jenny Russell. So, this is a special bonus episode, and it’s covering something that I’ve heard about a lot lately and that I have dealt with a lot in my marketing career, especially as it deals with tourism, small towns, and economic development. It’s “how do I define my small town and give it its own identity”? An identity that nobody else can claim.
So something I take a lot of inspiration from on this is John Schallert. He has John Schallert’s destination boot camp. John was a longtime executive at Hallmark and in marketing, and he actually has courses that challenge people to think deeper about their marketing and their business. So a lot. It’s really actually tough work to think of.
Okay, what makes my business so. So special that nobody else can claim it? For example, there was bakery out of Phillipsburg that took on John Schaller’s destination boot camp. And she thought, and she thought, and she thought, okay, I’m a bakery. I serve coffee.
Nope, not specific enough. You need more. Okay, well. And she spent, you know, a long time figuring out what. What can I say?
That’s just me. It’s nobody else’s business but mine. And she goes, well, I take all the dough at the end of the day, and I make one big honker donut. They were like, that’s it. So now that bakery is home of the big honker donut.
And when people buy that donut, they get to ring the bell and say, I bought the big honker donut. So that was her thing that made her business special, and that was the only thing, the only place that could claim the big honker donut. And she claimed it first. So. And so that.
That was her. Her deal from John Schaller’s destination boot camp. So I’ve taken that a step further and gone, okay, well, how does this pertain to our communities? How do we talk about our communities? This is the only thing that we are, the only place that has that.
I often find that communities don’t think deep enough. So I was working with a community in a county, and we were doing strategic doing and strategic planning type of work, and they were trying to figure out what made, you know, what is their special hook. And they were. They had found something that was just them. Nobody else could claim it.
And I was really proud of them for that. And I’m like, okay, so let’s take this a step further. Let’s, you know, rename the county, you know, have a county tagline that says, we’re home of the. Let’s do little statues all throughout the county that have this particular thing on it. Because this is only you guys.
Nobody else can claim this. We’re going to be a destination for that. Well, one of the littler communities is like, ah, I don’t want to have that identity. That’s not the identity that we hold. So we’re gonna do our own thing, which is fine, do your own thing.
But they were like, we’re gonna do statues of buffaloes and we’re gonna put them all over town and we’re gonna paint them different things and really cute idea, but not. It’s not personal enough. It’s not only you can claim this. So the other day I was at a conference and I heard some community go, this is our new thing. I we’re gonna get buffalo statues and we’re gonna put them all around the county and they’re gonna be painted again.
Beautiful idea, but not specific enough. Now there are two communities not that far from each other that are claiming buffalo statues. The other thing about that is any community from basically Oklahoma all the way up to Montana, in the Midwest and in the central part of the United States can claim buffalo. Buffalo and bison. That’s what we’re known for.
We’re known for the pioneer spirit. We’re known for wide open spaces and prairies. All of us have that. So think deeper, go into your history, figure out what thing can nobody else claim. And if you need help with that, we are experts at that.
Now, we have done that a lot for different communities. So we have a whole education division called Remarkably Rural through JenRus Freelance. And we will come out to your community, help you study your different histories and different parts of your culture that make you you and actually have focus groups in your community and help everybody decide what is our special thing, what can nobody else claim, and what is just us. So if you need help with that, hit me up. Be happy to help you.
We want to help all of our places be destinations. Even the smallest places have their own history. All of our smallest places have the eight cultural elements. That’s another group that we’re super passionate about and we believe a lot in is the Kansas Sampler Foundation. They have all kinds of things, the eight cultural rules of communities that even the smallest communities have.
I remember talking to her when I was doing some research on my hometown. And I thought, you’re not going to have any information on this. It’s such a small town. Every community has these eight cultural elements. And every community can be interesting, no matter how big or how small.
So again, if you need help let us know. I’ll drop our information here in the different comments in the different parts of our podcast today, and we would love to hear from you more. Thank you.