Perception is everything!

When marketing or branding a product or service, that is predominantly aimed at members of the public, our perception is all encompassing to the process of actually successfully buying that product or service.

In circumstances where we have a poor perception of a product or service we are pre-programmed to avoid at all costs and to a greater degree we imagine, rightly or wrongly, that said product or service is inherently poor or inferior, regardless of what the marketing messages might be telling us.

By definition, perception is the process in which we use our senses to acquire information about the surrounding environment or a particular situation.

And how does this exactly relate to Waterford City.

It is very simple. Everyone’s perception of Waterford City varies in an ever so slightly different way because we all sense experiences in slightly differing ways.

To my mind the City still has a huge untapped potential that needs to be realised in the short and medium term to get the City back as the economic hub of the South East. In my current work role and through my involvement with various groups and committees I see firsthand the enormous amount of work being planned and being carried out. This work will, without any doubt, benefit the many businesses and therefore all the people of Waterford City and County in the very near future.

However, as I am so immersed in these processes my perception more often than not differs from that of my family, my close friends and my business colleagues. I just constantly see that the City and County have not really scratched the surface of what is possible to drive the region forward and for Waterford City to regain its rightful place as the fourth City of Ireland (in economic terms). 

I am always a glass half full person.

I do often feel that I am sometimes alone in that positivity or at the very least I am one of a very small minority that sees a positive future vision that will literally put Waterford back on the map.

I have advocated on many occasions, both in print and on radio, that every voter in Waterford should attend at least one Council meeting in their lifetime. This will give voters the chance to see at firsthand how Council runs, functions and operates through our locally elected representatives. It will also help people understand how the City and or County are perceived through the eyes our elected representatives and the council executive.

Is your vision of the City the same as that of our elected representatives?

With an ever improving retail offering we must encourage even more people back into Waterford City Centre to experience these new shopping opportunities and with the proposed additional shopping centre to come on stream we must take every opportunity to drive up footfall in the City Centre.

It is more important than ever to get this right as we now see out of City Centre retail villages offering a real carrot to attracting shoppers – lots of free car parking!

The many City Centre retail shops can encourage people across their threshold with sales, end of season sales and lots of seasonal special offers. So why can we not look towards opportunities that offer a similar enticing promotion based around parking your car?

Monaco where the first hour of car parking is FREE!

Will further reduced car parking rates or specific car parking offers, similar to those in Cork, Limerick, Dungarvan and Kilkenny, bring increased footfall back into to the City Centre?

Well, we will not know until we have tried and until we try we will always be perceived, by the people of Waterford and many of our visitors, as an expensive place to park a car - no matter what the car park sign states the hourly rate might be.

Imagine All The People.

As businesses edge ever closer to the last quarter of the 2015 financial year many will start reviewing the year just past and start to scrutinise whether or not it has come up to the meticulous financial planning that took place some nine or even ten months or so ago. As each of Waterford’s many City Centre businesses give due consideration as to whether 2015 has been a good, bad or just an average year we must bear in mind that there as some circa 1500 people employed across our City Centre and as such our City Centre is one of our largest “employers” and the success or failure of our City Centre will impact on everyone who lives, works and plays in Waterford.

There can be no doubt that increasing footfall in the last quarter of the year will be welcome, but I fear that it will not be enough for a number of businesses who are once again literally hanging on by their fingertips – it seems that this is becoming a rather worrying annual trend!

We need to address a more constructive and creative way of increasing the footfall right across the entire City Centre and we need to ensure that our City Centre becomes a destination that attracts and encourages a higher spend from right across the wider South East region and further afield.

At present we can see continued pressure on our City Centre businesses and there is repeated increased pressure on these businesses in terms of paying the “day to day” associated business costs. In fact there are many business owners now having to resort to paying for business bills and expenses on their own personal credit cards just to survive from one month to the next. Yet this message of hardship does not seem to be being addressed and there are many people that quite wrongly assume that if you are in business today in Waterford you are making a fortune! How wrong can you be!

Let us not be in any doubt that Waterford is on the third or last tier of Ireland’s economic recovery and we lag so far behind the likes Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway that it will take significant investment and help to get us near to any sort of meaningful recovery, let alone on par with these other Cities that are now so far ahead of Waterford that we may never catch up. By the very nature of this lopsided, central belt, recovery the South East and North West will need considerable economic incentives that far exceed what we are currently receiving at the moment.

Our City Centre employers must have an opportunity to compete and this in turn will create employment and this in turn will generate greater spend and this in turn will increase footfall – it really is a case of ever increasing circles. But alas there are those who cannot see these opportunities and rather than use carrots to get our localised economy moving, once again we are being beaten with not one stick but several sticks all at once.

So just how do we increase the footfall through our City Centre and that is the €64,000,000 question?

Our festivals certainly bring additional footfall to the City but they do not necessarily bring increased spend for our hard hit commercial rate payers. The many festivals that we can now call annual events do continue to be reasonably successful but as with all events they have a lifespan and there are pluses and minuses to holding and staging such large annual events.

Unless these are staged as part of an overall “festival plan”, that avoids “clustering” of events, then there will be a diminishing return on our investment. In addition due to the fact that we continue to see falling or stagnant footfall to the City “clustering” our festival automatically equates to lessening the economic benefit for the commercial rate paying businesses in our City.

If we are to become a “festival capital” capable of rivalling the likes of Galway City then we must try harder to get it right, and perhaps more importantly we must work harder to get a greater “buy-in” from the very businesses that are paying their part through annual commercial rates contributions. At present many of these businesses see and perceive no or very little financial return and therefore we will continue to see issues around “buy-in”. Perhaps the messaging is all wrong and just maybe certain stakeholders are just expecting businesses to “buy-in” without examining the messaging they are delivering. Or at the very least they are wrongly “assuming” they have got the messaging right when in fact the only people on the same page are those closest to them and not the wider City stakeholders.

In a past life I organised trade exhibitions all around the UK and to keep these exhibitions fresh and relevant we had to introduce new exhibitors every year, we had to develop the exhibition every year and we had to be very creative with the messaging every year. If we got all that right we would continue to see annual increases in visitor numbers and increased visitor numbers meant more income for the exhibitors and this in turn gave the exhibition longevity. Get it wrong and an exhibition would very quickly become extinct. As I see it attracting people to our City Centre is much like attract people to those exhibitions I once relied on to make a living. In the exhibition industry we needed to have lots of carrots and there was not a stick to be seen anywhere.

One of the other recurrent issues with driving footfall up in the City Centre is of course the perceived cost of car parking. As a City we can now see mounting pressure attracting people from residential areas such as the Dunmore Road into the City Centre. The now huge variety of new shops and free car parking available in and around Ardkeen means there is less of an incentive for people to travel those extra few kilometres to the City Centre.

Drive past this area of the City and you will see many, many cars parked and many people shopping. And with the imminent proposed start to the excellent GIY project there will be literally many more attractive carrots in this area that will prevent even more people coming into the City Centre.

So it seems that unless we come up with a holistic approach to ensuring the renaissance of the City Centre we will continue to see it struggle and we will continue to see footfall remaining stagnant or falling. We really must come up with creative solutions that communicate the unique selling points of our City Centre and we need to give our City Centre businesses a much needed helping hand.

Let us stop looking for radical consultant lead answers when every man and his dog knows what is needed. We seem to be trying all manner of complicated solutions and yet the answers may well be right under our noses.