Stolen and Botched Ideas

This is a story about stolen ideas that were botched and what went wrong in their implementation.

I applied for a job with the local Main Street program. They were a longstanding nonprofit in town called Aberdeen Revitalization Movement and they were making the transition to get certified (or whatever the term is) as a Main Street program.

The name Aberdeen Revitalization Movement just screams "Please help us SAVE our DYING town!" This is not a good means to promote a town.

Begging people to move there and invest because you can't figure out how to breathe life into it and you want random strangers to take pity on you and give your town mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is highly unlikely to attract investors and new business. It's extremely likely to have the opposite effect.

So I suggested two things:

1. You need to reposition yourself as a downtown association, kind of the business equivalent of a friends of the library organization. You don't need to be DYING to need a steward looking out for the economic health of the area, like a gardener weeding and watering things to keep things in good shape.

2. As part of that, you need a new name. This one isn't good advertising.

I did write a blog post at some point and talked about how they were basically trying to put lipstick on a pig and "it's green lipstick." I also compared it to trying to get someone to "date your fat sister" without even calling her a BBW.

Some people are into generous curves. They don't talk about plump bodies the same way as fat haters. You need to learn the lingo to appeal to that crowd.

So basically it was a group of people supposedly with a mission to promote and develop the town who had nothing nice to say about it. And no plans to actually develop it. 

But they thought if they whined and cried enough about what was wrong with the town, people would move there and improve it for them, I guess.

Um, no. Investors put money into something expecting to get a return. Even charities have goals for what they want to see happen if they get involved.

Businesses move somewhere to make money, not to enhance your bottom line at their expense. So you need to be able to tell people somewhat objectively what exists and have a realistic idea of what it's good for.

The guy they hired loved playing big man on campus and was thrilled to brag about deals he was working on. But they all fell through because he had no idea what he was doing.

He didn't care. As long as they paid him and he got to feel like a mover and shaker, it didn't bother him that no development was happening.

One deal he tried to put together was with some classic car organization that held some event annually. I'm pretty sure it fell through because the town doesn't have enough hotel rooms for current needs, much less excess capacity to soak up a large influx of people for some new annual event.

So he had absolutely no idea how to assess what the town has to offer and who might be able to capitalize on their existing assets. And he was also the absolute worst person in public meetings about trash talking the town when he's the guy they are paying to promote it to outsiders.

He did also act on my second idea about changing the name and botched that too. 

They had a website with a pretty good URL: DowntownAberdeen.com. It tells you the area they cover right in the name, though it didn't initially tell you the state until I criticized their awful website in a blog post and he updated it accordingly (of course without giving me credit or anything).

So they kept the legal name on their bank accounts as Aberdeen Revitalization Movement and filed a DBA -- doing business as -- to promote the organization as Downtown Aberdeen Association.

It's facepalm worthy. It breaks the phrase "downtown association" so it's not immediately apparent to people what that means AND they used the initials a LOT. Those initials are DAA.

In the US, DA is District Attorney. Every single time I heard or saw DAA, I wanted to know what I was going to be prosecuted for. It always took me a second to get it to click this is their super dumb attempt to reposition themselves as a downtown association.

Like they couldn't have at least called it Association of Downtown Aberdeen and then used ADA as the initials? No, I guess not.

(An episode of All in the Family comes to mind where Archie is offended that his daughter is using his name as their son's middle name and her husband's father's name as the first name. The punchline is that if they put Archibald first, the kid's initials would be ASS.)

I worked at Aflac for five years. Aflac stands for American Family Life Assurance Company and I grew up seeing that name everywhere because they were founded in the city where I was born and raised about a decade before my birth.

They were the biggest civilian employer there and they own the only skyscraper in the downtown area. When I was growing up, school kids got taken on a tour of The Tower as a school field trip.

And then I worked there for a few years in my forties and heard insider stories, including stories about the name change.

Aflac decided they needed a shorter name than American Family Life Assurance Company but they offer their products in all fifty states, some US territories and Japan, so a legal name change would have involved filing paperwork in more than fifty places. It would have been a huge headache. 

"Huge headache" is no doubt why Aberdeen Revitalization Movement never legally changed their name though I was told they looked into it or maybe tried to do so years before I moved there and it didn't happen.

Aflac is just the acronym for American Family Life Assurance Company. Going by that doesn't require a legal name change.

It's like calling someone Bill instead of William. No one will be shocked if you tell them "Make the check out to William." even though all you ever call them is Bill.

My idea --that no one at Aberdeen Revitalization Movement ever heard because I was shot down in the public meeting and then the idea was stolen by someone who never worked at Aflac -- was we would quietly start using the initials ARM on everything and describe it as a downtown association.

Then talk to the bank and see if they would accept checks made out to ARM or if we would need to have people write it out the long way when donating.

I did run it past someone else in town at a different organization and she liked it and commented on how it sounds strong, like a muscular arm or strong helping hand. (The logo for Arm and Hammer comes to mind.)

Footnote

If Aberdeen Revitalization Movement implements the ideas in this post after years of jerking me around, it's evidence they really did intentionally shaft me for years and are STILL stalking me and stealing ideas from someone they've only ever victimized. Contemplate THAT while considering doing business with them and what it says about how they are likely to treat YOU.

Updated Saturday 26 Oct 2024.