West Hollywood--Small Thinking Big
The promotional campaign is based on the fact that more than 40% of the city’s economic activity is derived from “creative” industries such as fashion, food and the arts.
To much of America, Hollywood is the community associated with creative industries. But Rick Cole contends that the real imaginative minds can be found just a little to the west.
As executive director of the West Hollywood Marketing Corp., Cole’s job is to persuade the world that the small city of West Hollywood, which was perhaps best known as the “Gay Camelot” in its early days, is Los Angeles’ oasis of creative expression.
Over the last two years, the nonprofit marketing corporation, one of the few of its kind in the nation, has produced a stream of innovative brochures, banners and catalogues trumpeting West Hollywood’s virtues as a “Creative City,” while downplaying the significance of its sizable homosexual population.
The effort has angered some gay activists. But city officials report that sales and hotel tax revenues are on the rise, and competitors say that West Hollywood may be setting the pace for a whole new style of municipal marketing.
“I think it’s the best thing since sliced bread,” said Beverly Moore, director of the Santa Monica Convention and Visitors Bureau. “They’re stylized, they’re attractive and they’re classy. They are also carving out a whole new niche, and I think that other cities will follow their example.”
Bill Welch ‘Impressed’
“I’m very impressed,” said Bill Welch, who heads the neighboring Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. “It shows me that they are at the forefront.”
The West Hollywood promotional campaign, which costs the city about $400,000 annually, presents a picture of a progressive and stylish community that already has one foot firmly planted in the 1990s--a place at the very vortex of fashion, design, night life and communications.
Cole’s strategy is based on the fact that more than 40% of the city’s economic activity is derived from “creative” industries such as fashion, food and the arts. With those forces so prevalent, Cole said, it is natural to promote West Hollywood as an “artistic and avant-garde” area that can legitimately be compared to New York’s Greenwich Village and the Left Bank in Paris.
It is an ambitious effort for such a small city. In Santa Monica, which is more than twice the size of West Hollywood, the marketing budget is about the same. Redondo Beach, which also has more people than West Hollywood, spends only $100,000 a year on promotion. And Burbank, with 90,000 residents, has no marketing budget--indeed, the Burbank City Council earlier this year rejected the idea of spending money on self promotion.
Seen as Powerful Tool
Cole, however, sees marketing as a powerful tool. Earlier this year he started a trumped-up feud with Beverly Hills, calling the wealthy neighboring enclave a “mummified version of itself” and publicizing the fact that West Hollywood’s eating and drinking establishments out-performed those in Beverly Hills--which recently launched a $1.7-million promotional campaign in conjunction with its 75th anniversary--in the first nine months of 1987.
But Cole said the marketing is designed to do more than draw free-spending tourists to West Hollywood’s restaurants, clubs and stores. The new city is also trying to give residents a stronger sense of community.
“Here’s a tiny city in which the whole economy is built around the creative fields,” Cole said, “and we decided that that is what we wanted to project. . . . The idea was let’s focus on that concept and run with it.”
Since the fall of 1986 that image has been hammered home in a series of glossy and colorful brochures in Los Angeles-area upscale magazines, in news releases to national publications and in business-oriented ads claiming that West Hollywood is “Where Creativity Gets Down to Business.”
In an effort to provide the 1.9-square-mile city of about 40,000 people with a better sense of place, the corporation last year put up 500 modernistic purple and blue street banners to reinforce the “Creative City” theme.
Features Unknown
Until the campaign started, Cole said, many people did not even know where West Hollywood was, much less that it was the home of the Sunset Strip, the Pacific Design Center, Spago, the “Avenues of Design”--a home furnishing and decorating area--and Warner Studios.
The densely populated city, which officials estimate has a one-quarter homosexual population, was better known as a community in turmoil in its early years, as the City Council canceled Christmas as a paid holiday while enacting a tough rent-control law and stringent development guidelines that alienated business interests. Later, its first mayor, a lesbian activist, was convicted of embezzling funds from a social service agency she headed.
“In the beginning, the corporation was reacting to some of the city’s negative images as a place that moved on political serendipity, a place that was too liberal, too concerned about social policy . . . and not about the economics of running the city,” said City Councilman Stephen Schulte.
Ronald S. Kates, a real estate executive who helped persuade the city that it should form the corporation and who now chairs the marketing group’s 12-member board, said West Hollywood sorely needed to polish its image.
“We felt we really had to do something to tell the world what West Hollywood is, because it was completely misunderstood,” Kates said. “Our job was to take the creative city it has always been and market that concept.”
Approach Questioned
Yet there are some who feel that the corporation, for all its successes, has focused far too much on the glamour and far too little on the homosexual community, which played a pivotal role in securing city status for West Hollywood in 1984.
Bob Craig, the editor of gay-oriented Frontiers magazine, said many of his readers have complained about the corporation.
Schulte said he shares their concerns. “I would like to see them acknowledge that a lot of the businesses in West Hollywood are gay-owned,” said Schulte, a gay activist. “They have not marketed to a gay audience . . . and they need to do more of that.”
Councilman John Heilman arranged a meeting in June between angry gay leaders and the marketing corporation, which is expected to lead to some new approaches.
“The corporation will be doing targeted advertising to the national gay and lesbian community,” Heilman said. “They are also developing a gay and lesbian visitor’s guide,” highlighting businesses that are owned by or cater to homosexuals, such as night clubs, restaurants and beauty salons.
Cole said the corporation has from the start struggled with the issue. In one instance, he said, he rejected a citizen’s serious suggestion that the corporation sponsor a “Queen for a Day” contest for transvestites. The basic problem, he said, is that the marketing team is dedicated to broadening the city’s image but cannot afford to offend a powerful portion of the community.
‘Homophobia’ an Issue
“That’s been a tough one for us to pull off because of the homophobia that has been accentuated by AIDS,” Cole said. “Gays are rightly proud of the city’s gay image, but it’s virtually impossible to address the agenda of gay activists who would like to portray the city as the ‘Gay Camelot.’ It’s hard to cope with this issue in a way everyone is going to feel good about.”
City Manager Paul Brotzman supports Cole, asserting that West Hollywood must reach out to people who have little interest in gay bars and who once may have viewed the city as an unstable and hostile place.
“The council wanted to create the corporation to market the community as a whole, not to downplay the gay businesses and people,” Brotzman said.
“There is, without question, a clear recognition that the gay community makes a significant contribution to this community, and that needs to be pointed out. But there is also recognition that gays represent about 25% of the community, and that there is also a lot more here. And that also needs to be shown.”
As evidence of the marketing corporation’s success, Cole and Brotzman point out that West Hollywood’s sales tax revenues jumped from $6 million to $6.5 million, between fiscal 1986 and fiscal 1987. During the same period, hotel tax receipts rose from $3.1 million to $3.7 million.
Recognition Cited
They also note that national publications such as ADWEEK, which credited West Hollywood with being at the “cutting edge” of city marketing.
Cole and his assistant, Marsha Meyer-Sculatti, are the corporation’s only staff members. They work in conjunction with advertising and public relations firms that help frame the group’s message and produce its colorful handouts.
To Klaus Ortlieb, the manager of the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, their greatest accomplishment has been to give outsiders a better sense of West Hollywood’s personality. “People are starting to realize that this is a separate city,” Ortlieb said.
As with many advertising campaigns, however, the picture may be prettier than reality.
The marketing corporation has accentuated the upscale aspects of the community, such as the Sunset Strip and the pricey furniture shops along Robertson Boulevard, while playing down or ignoring the fact that West Hollywood has a relatively large number of struggling senior citizens and immigrants.
There are passing references to less-creative businesses such as the Tail o’ the Pup hot dog stand, which is shaped like a wiener. But even that landmark is cast as a “hip hot dog stand” in the brochures.
Cole, who lives in Pasadena and serves on that city’s Board of Directors, said a successful marketing campaign must focus on a community’s most alluring traits, especially in a region as large and competitive as Southern California.
“This is a different kind of a project,” Cole said. “We’re trying to carve out a special niche in the mental landscape of this place. . . . We want to be the place setting the trends and being experimental. We’re not selling cat food or dishwashers. We’re trying to give an identity to a new city.”
‘We’re not selling cat food or dishwashers. We’re trying to give an identity to a new city.’
