In 2003 the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority ran a line written by R&R Partners that went “What happens here, stays here.” It sold no hotel, no rate, no property. It sold a feeling about who you were allowed to be for seventy-two hours, and it is still the most quoted piece of destination advertising ever made.
The genius of this approach is not that it sold a feeling. Plenty of ads sell feelings and that’s usually the goal. No, the part that made the line stick is that no other city on earth could have said it. Don’t believe us? Try putting Phoenix or Orlando in front of that line and watch it crumble like a house of cards in a two-year-old’s path.
That is what a brand actually is — not the warmth of the message, but the fact that the message belongs to one place and wouldn’t fit anywhere else.
Which brings us to something our team keeps seeing in retail center marketing, and it is not the problem the category thinks it has.
Owners and operators have spent the better part of a decade on placemaking, activations, programming, influencer partnerships, photogenic corners built specifically for instagrammable moments. It worked. Instagram is filled with shoppers showing off their wings in every major city in America. Average visit length at open-air and enclosed centers climbed again this August, past seventy-five minutes by Placer.ai’s count, with their analysts crediting events, dining and placemaking directly. Nobody needs to be told their property is a destination. They built it that way on purpose.
Here is the harder thing. Because the playbook worked, everyone started using it everywhere at roughly the same time — and the advertising that came out of it is now close to interchangeable. Pull up ten centers’ feeds from ten different markets and you will find the same string lights, the same mural wall, the same slow pan across a food hall, the same local maker at the same weekend pop-up, the same drone shot at golden hour. Each promotional piece is well made. However, collectively they have erased the difference between the properties that made them.
In our business this flattening of experiences has a name, and it is by far the most expensive direction a brand can go in.
Parity.
Parity means nothing in the work distinguishes you, so attention has to be bought rather than earned, and it has to be bought again every quarter at a price that only goes up. Distinctiveness is the only marketing asset that adds up. Everything else equates to flushing your money down the toilet.
Now, before anybody gets defensive, go pull your own last twelve months. Not the strategy deck — the actual posts, the ones you were most proud of in June. Read it the way a shopper in your market would, which is to say fast and without caring. Then count how much of it is about a thing that is happening versus how much of it is about who you are. Most of the work we see lands somewhere around a split of 90 to 10. It’s what happens when every brief in a category quietly turns into a promotions brief. We run a short exercise with clients to make this impossible to miss, and here at QV we call it Swap the Sign.
Try it out for yourself. It takes five minutes.
Take the strongest piece of advertising you produced this year, cover your logo, and drop a competitor’s in its place. Does anything break? Does a single frame, line or idea suddenly not make sense? If the answer is no or if it simply becomes their ad, then what you bought was reach, not advertising. That is the swap, and most work fails it.
It fails for an understandable reason: the amenity became the story when it really should have been the set. A set is where something happens; it is not what happened. A food hall is not a differentiator, because the center eleven miles away is opening one in March. The amenity is table stakes, but what gets said about how it’s supposed to be experienced is the brand.
But what message you land on must come from something only that property can claim, which is almost never an amenity. It is usually something the market decided on its own. Start searching for the thing locals already say when a friend asks why they go there, the ritual that formed around a Saturday morning or the reason a Tuesday looks different there than it does anywhere else in that city. That material that will distinguish your brand exists at every property we have ever worked on. However it almost never shows up in the advertising, because it does not look like marketing until somebody writes it down.
So before next year’s plan gets signed, run the swap on the best thing in it. If a competitor could publish that work Monday morning with their logo in the corner and lose nothing at all, the budget behind it is buying impressions but not building belief.
Impressions are rented and the lease goes up every year. The one line item that appreciates is the piece of work that nobody else in the market could have run — and that is a strategic problem long before it is a media problem.
