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I realized it may be difficult to leave comments to blog posts without a google account. I have changed the settings, so if you want to leave a comment, just click on "comments" at the end of this post. You will then need to "select profile" after you type in your comment. Click on "Name/URL". You will then type in your name as you would like it to appear. You can leave the URL field blank. Your comment will then appear on the blog. Thanks!

Merchants Meeting Date

Thanks Doug for your thoughts on bringing all the merchants together for some round table discussions. Please look at your calendars and let me know how the week of March 16th looks for everyone. I don't know if we want to offer one in the morning around 8:00 am and one in the evening around 6:00 or 6:30 pm or just do one time and see who shows up.

This will be a time to showcase what the campaign is all about and then step back and let the merchants discuss it amongst themselves and brainstorm ideas. What do you think?

A new day...

Over the past six months, the Economic Development Commission and the towns of Rutherfordton, Forest City and Spindale have been working together with Tripp Muldrow, a community development consultant, on Rutherford County's commercial development initative. Tripp completed a study that showed a $640 million dollar sales leakage in our primary and secondary trade areas (see link to study on the right sidebar). With this in mind, he branded our campaign "TRI LOCAL".

We are now looking to you, to help us put a unified campaign together to bring this concept to the citizens of Rutherford County. This campaign will be both a marketing and advertising effort to get the brand out to the public, but it will also be a campaign of services to help local merchants better position themselves to gain addtional sales. This might be through seminar classes, one-on-one assistance, programs, roundtables, etc.

What we are asking for with this blog, is a place for you to give input on what you would like to see this campaign materialize into. What are your thoughts and ideas? What can you or your organization contribute to this effort? Let's open the discussion.