After an extensive study into Armidale’s city centre by CBD ‘Guru’ Linda Hailey, it’s not all doom and gloom for retailers, with the draft Armidale City Marketing Plan unveiled to Armidale Dumaresq Council and community stakeholders last week at the Armidale Ex-Services Memorial Club.
Ms Hailey highlighted the city centre’s strengths, including: a compact business precinct; architectural heritage; well designed streetscape; safe and inviting ambience; well managed parking; and an extensive retail and product mix.
“I first visited Armidale for this project in October of last year,” said Linda Hailey
“The idea of this marketing plan is to revitalise the CBD. This isn’t done very often and I think I am the only consultant that does this kind of work.”
The first step for Ms Hailey in developing the marketing plan was to come into the business community and assess.
“Early on I get my first impressions, I read the town through the stock; I can tell who they are trying to target. I look at access and egress; how easy it is to get in and out,” said Ms Hailey.
“I also do a retail mix review to see what clusters we have got.”
Ms Hailey conducted two focus groups with business owners and representatives of the business community to gauge their opinions.
“I compare the feedback from the focus groups with my impressions and I look for the gaps,” said Ms Hailey. “Are there markets and opportunities that can be tapped into?”
Some of the key issues and opportunities in the marketing plan included better definition of the city centre; improving navigation of the city; developing a clear marketing position – image and branding. This could include a website for the city centre and an app and longer trading hours, including weekends.
While ADC’s Economic Development team commissioned Ms Hailey’s Draft Plan, she suggested that, unless the business community takes ownership of the initiative, it will struggle to succeed.
Project Manager with ADC’s Economic Development, Tourism and Marketing Harold Ritch said that last week’s workshop with Linda Hailey was about setting some priorities and moving forward with some of the recommendations in the marketing report.
“We need to map out a plan moving forward,” said Harold Ritch.
“There are quite a number of things in Linda’s report that we hadn’t really thought about, but the essence of the report really was about harnessing some the energy of some of the brilliant retailers in the town and work as a team to reinvigorate the mall.”
