By Jorge Casuso
October 13, 2009 -- For Downtown employees, Third Street Promenade may be a vista viewed from an office window between commutes, a place to grab lunch and head back to work.
For tourists, it’s playground cooled by ocean breezes where you can shop and watch a world go by you've never seen before.
For locals, it’s a place to run errands or catch a meal and a movie. Or, it may be all of these things.
What is Downtown Santa Monica? What comes to mind when you hear the words "Third Street Promenade?"
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| Shook Kelley's offices in Hollywood |
That's what Shook Kelley, a branding firm hired by Bayside District, is busy finding out as they prepare to propose an image makeover that will shape how the popular destination is perceived over the next quarter century.
Given that the three-block stretch of shops, eateries, movie theaters and street performers already draws some 10 million visitors a year, many from around the world, and rings up $300 million in sales, makes it no easy task.
“Santa Monica represents the good life,” says Kevin Kelley, a principal at Shook Kelley, which has offices in Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina. “All of us went there when we came to LA. It was the first place we visited.”
While Shook Kelley has earned a reputation for reviving dying communities, the challenge it faces in Downtown Santa Monica is one of trying to fix something most people would say isn’t broken, a strip that cities across the world have tried to emulate but never got quite right.
“I was taken on a tour of a street in the Philippines recently and I asked, ‘Where did you get the idea?” Kelley recalls. “They said, ‘Third Street Promenade.’
“There’s something authentic about it, and on some levels, it’s in jeopardy,” Kelley says. “Communities have to make trade offs. When they try to be everything to everybody, they become nothing to nobody.
“Places have to be about change,” Kelley, told the Bayside District Board last month. “They constantly have to be doing something different.”
Before coming up with a new “brand” that will evoke the soul of Downtown Santa Monica, Shook Kelley’s staff must hit the pavement and pore through reams of documents – conducting street interviews, querying stakeholders and analyzing surveys and demographic data.
“We have some early hunches (about a place), but we just start with an open mind,” says Jennifer Kim, a brand strategist who specializes in advertising. "We take the information and look for patterns.
“It’s kind of like detective work. You look for a lead, and you pursue that, and that will lead to another avenue, which could lead to a dead-end, and you abandon that and follow another lead.
“We take the information and start to look at identifying what the problem is. Is it organizational? Is it the consumer behavior? Is it an urban planning issue?”
The problem should not be couched as finding “an opportunity,” but, instead, should be viewed as what the company likes to call a “positive crisis,” Kim says.
“An opportunity doesn’t have a sense of energy. If you have a crisis, you have to take care of it right away. Ninety-nine percent of the work is finding that crisis. With something as successful as the Bayside, it could be hard.”
ON A RECENT WEEKDAY MORNING, Shook Kelly’s cultural anthropologist, Michael Powell, was strolling Third Street Promenade, taking in the scene. For a week, Powell has been conducting interviews and observing how people use the Promenade and surrounding streets.
“We want to know what you do? What brought you here? What attracted you to Santa Monica.” Powell says. “We talk to the man on the street, to business and civic leaders and people in between.
“We look at a lot of snapshots we try to piece together. You observe, write down what you see, then put together a larger perspective.”
Powell stopped to watch a group of teenagers pass by, a homeless man cross the Promenade and diners take their seats for an early lunch. But one particular sight catches his eye. A few tourists are taking turns snapping pictures of each other in front of the dinosaur topiaries.
How many other places in Santa Monica serve as a photo backdrop, Powell wonders. Perhaps only the beach. So what is it about the dinosaurs?
“I see a lot of people taking photos of each other in front of the dinosaurs,” he says. “You take a photo of someone there because it’s a meaningful place.”
Powell, who has a Ph.D in anthropology from Rice University, has been trained to see connections. He has spent years studying paranoia and how those who are sane connect legitimate facts to build conspiracy theories. “I’m fascinated with the kind of connections people can draw,” Powell says.
He also has studied how the dissident movement in Poland on the eve of the fall of communism absorbed the news fed to them by the official party organs.
“Beyond being a critical reader of newspapers, you have to read between the lines,” says Powell, who is an expert in freedom of information laws that are quickly spreading to countries across the globe. “You had to read in a critical, cynical and kind of skeptical way.”
If Powell views the project in primarily cultural terms, Kim brings years of experience in marketing.
“Creating a brand allows me to know how I would know if Santa Monica was the place I’d like to visit instead of Los Feliz,” she says. The brand, Kim adds, establishes “the meaning of the place and how you identify and how it reflects your own personal identity.”
While advertising agencies in the past viewed branding only in terms of communicating a message, Shook Kelley’s approach is more all encompassing, informing every aspect of a business, Kim says.
“Every decision you make affects the brand,” she says. “It impacts the business in a more fundamental way.”
Kevin Kelley, who founded the company with fellow architect Terry Shook in 1992, adds a third dimension to the process. Kelley is big on the physical attributes that make an environment different from all others and serves as the stage for the human drama.
Visitors should know they are entering a special space, what Kelley calls the “threshold experience,” and, ideally, come out different after having been there.
“When do I know I’m here? Does it happen with a bang, or does it happen gradually? Do you come out different?
“We look at how people perceive their place,” Kelley told the Bayside Board. “If I go through all the trouble to come to Santa Monica, what’s the payoff?”
You have to keep them coming back, Kelley said, and that's where branding comes in.
“Do I trust the place, and what do I trust it for? It’s very difficult to fix a perception. Do a gesture, something you will never forget.
“There’s probably nothing more important than branding,” he told the board. “The soul of an entity is really its brand.”
