The Zip: Episode 32

It’s hard to be a big fish in a small pond. The thought is – hey, I’m a big fish. I’m badass. Everyone’s gonna wanna watch me swim, see what I do, follow me around. You get to the small pond, and it works for a while. A generation or two of small fish think you’re cool, because you’re the big fish, from the big pond. You’re fancy. You know big pond things. But sooner or later, some of the small fish start to innovate. They realize small fish can do things you can’t do, and that they know their own pond better than you. They can speak to the other small fish about small fish experiences. And you’re like, well crud. The small fish now have their own thing going here. I taught them some big pond things, and they’ve made it their own.

And that experience, in essence, is what this conversation is about. Except the fish are, well, business. Surprise! We haven’t turned into an outdoor sport podcast.

Seriously though, today I’m interviewing Gregg Stewart, long-time local marketer and the founder & President of 15 miles, a local marketing company. I found Gregg due to a piece he wrote on understanding local markets, from a national perspective, and he believes that in order to stay relevant in local marketplace, big brands need to start to emulate the unique characteristics that differentiate each ‘small pond.’

These days, we do want to buy local. I even saw a Whole Foods recently that advertised their ‘local’ fare. They get it – why choose Whole Foods over the farmers market? Unless whole foods can be just as local.

In this conversation, Gregg and I talk about ideas for big brands who want to interact with their customers, where they live. It’s about more than mass-customizing ads, he says. It’s about strategically choosing which parts of your brand will be consistent, city to city, and which parts need to change for different markets.

And we also talk about one of my favorite topics as of late – one I don’t really bring up much on this podcast – management and team building. Building out our 5-person ZipSprout team over the past 18 months, I’ve been so fortunate to reel in some amazing people, but I’ve made some mistakes as well. I’m always eager to learn from leaders with more experience. And Gregg has some great advice on this topic.

One last note- I didn’t edit out very beginning to our conversation like I sometimes do, because I kind of feel like keeping the banter today. “over polished” sounds very big fish, anyways.

And hey, welcome to the Zip.

Gregg Stewart:
I’m terrific, Megan. How are you today? Happy Valentine’s Day.

Megan Hannay:
Thank you. Happy Valentine’s Day to you, as well. I’m doing pretty well, just kind of another Tuesday here. How about you? Did your patent filing all work out?

Gregg Stewart:
I’m still working through something with the lawyer, but you know, lawyers take forever.

Megan Hannay:
Those kind of things, I feel like, probably take a very long time.

Gregg Stewart:
I have two now, and they do take a long time, because they have to go from utility status, and then you have to go through a whole process that’s just—it’s just why we keep lawyers in business, I guess.

Megan Hannay:
And you have to make sure that no one else has filed the exact same type of patent, you have to make it unique enough, right?

Gregg Stewart:
Correct. Some of it’s easy and some of it’s not. It all depends on timing and things like that. And patents are only as valuable as you’re willing to protect them, like anything else. Now, where are you based out of?

Megan Hannay:
I’m in Durham, North Carolina.

Gregg Stewart:
My children live in Greenville, South Carolina, is that anywhere close to that?

Megan Hannay:
Ah, you know I’ve never been to Greenville, but I’ve heard good things. I’ve heard it’s a really cute town in South Carolina that people are loving. I’ve never been there, but, yes. I hear it’s nice.

Gregg Stewart:
Okay, very cool.

Megan Hannay:
And you’re in New York, right?

Gregg Stewart:
Connecticut. In the middle of nowhere I live on top of a mountain with nothing around me.

Megan Hannay:
Seriously? That’s awesome!

Gregg Stewart:
Yes, it is.

Megan Hannay:
Okay, well I will ask you about that, because part of the podcast is I ask people where they live. For some reason, I thought you were in New York, but I’ll change that to Connecticut. So, basically, I have a few questions lined up to ask you. It’s pretty casual, conversational. And from there, obviously, if there’s anything I don’t ask that you think is pertinent, or if there’s anything you want to talk about, feel free to bring it up. From there, I’ll edit it, and in a few weeks when it’s live, I’ll let you know. Overall, it’s pretty quick and I really, really appreciate your time.

Gregg Stewart:
Terrific.

Megan Hannay:
So, I am rolling now, I’ll just begin and we can get going. Greg, thank you so much for being on The Zip today.

Gregg Stewart:
Thank you for having me.

Megan Hannay:
Absolutely. I read a column you wrote for Street Fight a few weeks back now on re-defining local, and I found myself in emphatic agreement throughout the article. I may have been in the choir you were preaching to, but I think there’s still a lot of people that aren’t quite in the congregation yet. So, I’d love to start by just digging into that piece.

You said at the beginning of your post that you’ve experienced frustration in seeing local simplified to meaning the Google map pack. I always say local citations are a big deal, especially for small businesses, but I agree that there’s a lot more to local. What do you think is being cut out of the picture when people focus on just the local pack?

Gregg Stewart:
I think that what we have today is that local’s been defined, obviously, as local media, so somebody’s searching within a geography for either merchants in that area or brands that serve that area. I think that part, though, is we focus as marketers from the top down. Everybody looks at Google, and Google, by all means, is certainly important from a directional media standpoint. So, that helps us connect the tissue between I’m looking for a plumber in Danbury, Connecticut, you enter that query and you can find that.

The challenge, though, is that plumber, if they had to live just off the leads that were searches for plumbers in Danbury, Connecticut, they’re not going to do so exceptionally well. If you look at traditional, old media sources, like Yellow Pages, that’s what filled the people looking or knowing what they looked for. What I’m more interested in, these days, is more to the awareness-building and also the two pieces that glue together awareness with demand-based searching, to drive even more leads for both local businesses, but also national brands that happen to market locally.

Megan Hannay:
Yes. So, can you give an example of what that hybrid solution would be?

Gregg Stewart:
I live in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and certainly Google has got a lot of searches up in our marketplace and that’s terrific, but there’s a whole host of local journals, there might be websites for the local newspapers, there’s bloggers that are very in tune with the local marketplace, and then there’s these hyper-local publishers that have news and events and information and advertising opportunities that are not as easily identified in the present form. So, for instance, in this county alone, there’s two larger sort of hyper-local sites, there’s the Hamlet Hub, which has between 60 or 65 different websites that cover the individual towns in the area, and they do so with both news and advertising opportunities for local and national marketers. However, if you’re a national marketer, you don’t even know they exist.

Megan Hannay:
Right. So, do you think national marketers should spend more effort looking for these local media outlets? Or do you think that’s something that, as a local business, you kind of have the advantage there?

Gregg Stewart:
I think that it’s a huge opportunity for national brands that want to market locally. A lot of big brands are either franchise-driven, or they’re products and services are sold by agents or dealers. I challenge, though, that the context of some of those ads is increased when the content or the information surrounding that is highly localized in nature. So, if you look at advertisers that are here in the Redding Pilot, for example, the old newspaper that has also an online journal, or the local radio station, or some of the hyper-local blogs, I believe that that advertising is a huge opportunity for somebody like an insurance company like Farmers Insurance or Allstate, where their agents want to appear as they’re supporting the local community. And in a large case, that’s the large piece of how locals is the differentiator for national brands that market locally. If they’re seen to be a participant in the community, that’s a huge leg up from a marketing standpoint.

Megan Hannay:
Yes, I totally agree with that. And you also mention in your piece that there are some programmatic ad platforms that do find hyper-local media options, but not most of them yet. So, who are they? Because I’ve looked into programmatic and I have the same sort of concerns about it, that it’s really just people putting national messaging at the local scale instead of really giving something a local twist. But are there services you can recommend for national marketers that might help them do programmatic but do it better, locally?

Gregg Stewart:
There’s a couple of nascent offerings out in the marketplace now. Let me clarify that. Most of them are doing sort of the same pattern. Again, they’ve gotten better at geotargeting. They do a really good job at geofencing and mobile devices so they can get highly localized, but they’re still doing that on the backs of major media. So, they might be doing that in the Facebook layer, in their network or the Google network, for example, or quasi-network setup and pulled together. The huge opportunity for these very highly localized media properties is really just developing now. So, there are some people that are racing towards that solution, but there’s some good localized solutions but the hyper-local piece is largely undelivered still.

Megan Hannay:
Yes, and I feel like that’s such a huge opportunity. It’s almost, somewhat like a race against time, because I feel like some of these hyper-local outlets are struggling to pay the bills and like, will we have a good solution in time to really help them? Because I think, right now—

Gregg Stewart:
I believe we will. I believe we will because many of them have local ad sales forces, and with solutions like—we’ve created a software solution called millipede here at 15miles. And that solution does seek out these localized pieces. Now, it’s in a private data right now, so I don’t want to speak too much about it, but suffice it to say it’s big job is first identifying the media outlets, and then also, sort of tying them together to see can they be reached through, say, Google GDN, Google Display Network, or in the Facebook network, or some other programmatic manners, or are there individual local buys that have to be sort of quasi-locally placed, or manually placed, and how do you blend the two of those together? Does that make sense?

Megan Hannay:
Yes, it does. So, how do you recommend a national brand create content that can serve? Because I think that can be one barrier, too. How do you recommend they create content that can serve all these different local areas?

Gregg Stewart:
If you look at it, an ad that plays well in New York City, may not play very well in Ottumwa, Iowa, for example. For most of those brands, if they use the dealers, agents or franchises, they certainly can get insight from their local sales outlets. They have an opinion and they can sort of bubble that up. So, local is complicated in a lot of little pieces. Sometimes those plans have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. There’s certainly a lot of ad technologies that will take a formatted ad from, per se, Farmers Insurance, or State Farm, and then they’ll put the lovely photo of the local agent, and try to make it look localized. But I think there’s an opportunity to go a little bit beyond that, also, and the way that the good brands are doing that are really taking into account and sourcing information from those local sales outlets.

Megan Hannay:
I think so. I was reading an article recently, somebody was advocating for user-generated content, and I feel like that could be a really good chance for a brand to use user-generated content. It’s like, well, we need tons of different content from all of our customers all over the place, why don’t we source—obviously with their permission, ask some of our current customers if we can adopt some of the pictures they’ve taken with our product, or that kind of thing, to give a local spin. Do you know of any brands that either with UGC or in other ways that are doing this well?

Gregg Stewart:
I think the area that you get with the brands is a huge amount of concern when they hear UGC. And brands have to understand that the brand is no longer owned by the monolith corporation, it’s owned by their constituents and the people that buy their products in those local marketplaces. I have not seen too many good manifestations of that, because sometimes, left to its own devices, you get incorrect information and you also get, God forbid, competitors taking advantage of their other brands. So, it’s sort of a slippery slope, and I don’t know that we’re anywhere near solving that problem yet, just understanding the media outlets and the ad units and the ad tables in terms of pricing in those local marketplaces is a big enough task to tackle for now. Certainly, on the creative side, for those ad units, that’s the next evolutionary phase of this.

Megan Hannay:
Got it. So you’re a very pragmatic, step one, step two, kind of problem solver.

Gregg Stewart:
You know, when you look at it, everybody’s been trying to tap into this local revenue stream and they think they’re going to make fortunes on it. I mean, Google has tried forever, and if you look at it, probably their largest disappointment is that they have not done a phenomenal job of unlocking ad dollars in the local marketplaces. They certainly have humongous amounts of money from big brands and e-commerce that are trying to market into these localities, but not much, really in totality, from the individual merchants in those local marketplaces. To solve it, first I think we have to identify the media sources, get that sort of squared away. I think you’ll see a lot more ad slugging, so you’ll have standard ads that are localized, so the brand signs off on a format and the locality or the agent, dealer, or franchisee puts in their content in that. And yes, I look at everything as sort of a crawl, walk, run. I think that we’re in a place where we can crawl in terms of understanding what those media outlets are, and sort of walk with those ad slugs. The run is when we start to allow the brand to differentiate into the local marketplace.

Megan Hannay:
Yes. The golden standard there. In your article, you give the example of Macy’s, which is pretty relevant. On the one hand, the brand has still, I think, has a lot of clout. You know, when you think of it, it’s a weird thing. When you think of the brand Macy’s, you still kind of have that classy, old New York feel, but then, if you think about being in the store, you kind of get this, oh, I don’t know, they’re kind of crowded with merchandise and not really anything of quality. So, what happened here? Why do you feel like Macy’s is a good example and how do you think it failed with local marketing?

Gregg Stewart:
I think it’s a great example of, their competitive advantage always was, back in the day, that they had local buyers in the stores, that understood their local marketplace and what their constituents or their customers wanted in that local marketplace. And it’s not dissimilar to how some brands build up and grow up. They may have a really good grassroots following, and all of a sudden as they sort of make acquisitions and they add more brands in there, and they rebrand other brands back into the mother brand of Macy’s, for example, they lost a lot of the DNA which was the connection with the local marketplace.

Then you’ve got people in New York or—I don’t know where their buyers are but I assume they’re in New York, they’re making decisions for Midwestern markets and Far Western markets and may not have really any inkling or knowledge of the local marketplace. They’re just buying in bulk, because they can get a better price, so they figure if it’s going to sell in New York, gosh, it must sell in St. Louis and Columbia, Missouri, and the challenge is that was a huge misstep in my calculation because it did nothing to differentiate them.

As we enter into the marketplace now where we’ve got the Amazons of the world, they’re going to be the low-cost provider that can get you the item in 24 hours or less, over time. So, they have to yield that, I think, to those kind of platforms, whereas the Macy’s experience, because it used to be so highly localized to the individual store location, we’ve really lost that flavor. That being said, I think that’s the huge advantage that some national brands can bring to the local marketplace. If they get back in touch with those local markets, and also, from a marketing and advertising standpoint, attract and provide some value on the community level, because the communities want a buy low culture. We’ve seen that with some of the American Express campaigns that are very successful, and national brands can play in that realm, or either regional brands can play in that realm also, if it’s real and it’s authentic, and it’s not just, hey, we buy anything and we sell it in bulk to anyone who wants to buy it.

Megan Hannay:
That’s a really good point, and it’s interesting. For Macy’s, I always would have thought Macy’s would be more of a competitor with an online boutique, you know what I mean? It’s weird to think of them in comparison with Amazon, because I think of Macy’s and I think of going somewhere and getting something inexpensively, but I think that’s a good point about how national brands really can do something great on the local level. They just have to not take away the local component of their business.

Gregg Stewart:
I look at some examples like REI, the outdoor sports equipment retailer, they do a really good job of playing up the local events that they have on specific landing pages on their website. And those events are not cookie cutter across the entire United States. Those are people in the local marketplace, in the local community that are getting in touch with their local customers and understanding what they need and value, and then creating events and teaching and learning examples around those different things. I think that’s a great example of how you can really tap the local community and really differentiate yourself.

Megan Hannay:
Yes, especially REI, because it’s like if you live somewhere in mountain territory, you’re going to sell different types of equipment and you’re going to have people who are interested in different sports than if you’re in the flatlands. I think it’s intuitive for that brand, but even for brands where it’s not as intuitive, it’s great to see a more local touch.

Gregg Stewart:
Precisely. Precisely.

Megan Hannay:
So, Gregg, conditioning a bit more to your own work, you run the local marketing agency 15miles, and you work with brands like Target, Fresh Market and Ashley Furniture on local marketing. So, first, what drew you in this direction? I speak with many folks who love local because they love the “little guy” so to speak. But what do you love about working with the big guys at the local level?

Gregg Stewart:
It’s just it’s a lot of fun. You can really make a major difference for some of these brands. I’m sort of like a digital dinosaur. I’ve been doing this since 1994 when I started my first digital agency. I came out of National Yellow Pages, for the ten years preceding that, you know, when I graduated college, but then I saw that Yellow Pages was going to die a death and it has, for the most part. But 20 years ago, digital was a lot different. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, there wasn’t a lot of differentiation, but there were some still local opportunities that were going around. What I get sort of jazzed about is creating opportunities for a brand to be relevant in the local marketplace, and to really leverage that. I’ve had the blessing to be grow up some pretty large agencies. Now, I’ve got a medium-sized agency that I own myself. So, it’s a lot more fun from the standpoint of what makes them tick, what they want to do in the local marketplace. And then, pulling off some pretty cool campaigns.

Megan Hannay:
So, what are some of the issues that these brands face at the local level. Or to put it another way, if you don’t want to speak specifically about things with certain brands that you’ve worked with, let’s say a national pet supply store became your client tomorrow, where would you look first to evaluate how they’re doing in local and plan for their future?

Gregg Stewart:
I’d want to understand the communities they serve, so, each community, and pets is a great example. There’s a lot of need-based organizations around pets in different communities, because of abandoned pets and such. In the local area here, we have a thing called ROAR. It’s funny because I’m going to a charity dinner in a few weeks for that, and it’s about rescues for animals in that local marketplace. You know, the Pet Smart’s of the world, they can certainly tap into what’s going on in those individual marketplaces, because those programs are highly local in nature, too. And maybe community outreach, and doing some things that are charitable around that. Without really putting a lot of noodle power towards it and giving a lot of thought, it’s getting in touch with what’s going on in the community and then leveraging that from the standpoint of doing good for the community, but also supporting and being a good patron in the community.

Megan Hannay:
So, are there challenges? I know you talked a little bit about just the making content hyper-local, but are there other challenges that national brands face when they’re trying to do well in local markets?

Gregg Stewart:
Yes, there’s always a number of different challenges, because many of them are driven by sales channel constraints. You may have an organization that has different levels of agents or dealers or franchisees, and they support them in different manners. That being said, also, not all markets are created equal. I mean, a brand is probably going to want to go to market differently in New York City, where they’ve got a large massive, humongous sales opportunity, versus some of the outlying rural marketplaces. But, giving the ammunition and the tools to all the outlets and then sort of bringing them along in the process, I think, is the key. I think the biggest opportunity in the programs that we have done here at 15miles that have really laid the foundation and had the greatest progress are ones that are highly educational in nature. When you get together, say 10,000 or 5,000 or 500 different agents or branches, they need to be educated on what this marketing means in the local marketplace, and also that it’s not like you just turn on a light switch and then magically your sales leads appear. You have to cultivate them and follow them up. So, the education part of what we do is just as important as the media marketing pieces.

Megan Hannay:
Do you feel you’ve had to become almost an expert on all the little geographies across the US or beyond, in order to help your clients?

Gregg Stewart:
Well, not me personally, but we do have some people that become very specific into areas. I think it’s a case of, most people, it’s those local outlets, if they’re branch managers or store managers or their agents, franchisees, they have the local market knowledge. What we try to do is, okay, let’s take your local market knowledge, adapt it, look at the different types of marketing programs that can be brought to the table, so here’s a menu of different options, and how can we tailor them specifically to your local market needs?

Megan Hannay:
Yes. That’s pretty cool. So beyond thinking about the local space, I read on, I think, your website or one of your profiles that you have a talent of creating good teams to work with brands. As someone who also is in charge of a team, I’d love to hear about your team building strategy. Do you seek out team members from diverse regions so that they can kind of know about different places, or do you focus on finding people with know-how to work with locals from afar?

Gregg Stewart:
That’s a great question. I have certainly learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes in team building. I’ll be quite honest with you.

Megan Hannay:
We have learned and made a lot of mistakes.

Gregg Stewart:
Oh, my goodness, I’ve gone from organizations that were four people that grew to several hundred, I’ve been in organizations that had tens of thousands of people when I was in an agency holding company environment. The differences, and I’ve been in different capital structures where you have private equity or venture capital powering a company, the key is to never lose sight of talent of the people that are involved. Each of them can contribute, and culture of a company becomes ultimately very important. In one assignment, I sort of lost touch with that, and it was a great learning event for me because team building in that environment was very difficult because we had a board that was very focused on just the bottom line, didn’t really care about anything besides that. As a leader at those kinds of organizations and as you build teams, you have to be understanding of that and how you can bring both sets of initiatives to the table, and let them be cohesive and integrated as opposed to management and us, so to speak.

But team building, to me, is just understanding what are the wants and aspirations of the people in their roles. Are they happy in their roles, are they the best roles that they’re acclimated to? And getting them the right tools to be successful. So, is it understanding and teaching? Is it opportunities to explore things outside of our offerings that helps them grow as an individual? I think when you have that, those people tend to flock around you your entire career. I’ve had people that I’ve been blessed to work with me that have followed me from engagement to engagement, or likewise, where just basically we find that we work exceptionally well together. Because, at the end of the day, if you’re in digital marketing, we put in a lot of hours, and it’s important the people that we surround ourselves with, and to make sure it’s—I’m not going to say a family environment, because I have a distinct and separate family, but a working environment that’s got mutual trust and respect, and a lot of fun doing good work for good customers.

Megan Hannay:
You spoke a little bit about making sure you’re not just focused on the bottom line, that you’re focused on team growth, are there other hiring mistakes that you’ve either made yourself or you’ve seen made in other agencies that really just don’t help when you’re working with—

Gregg Stewart:
Oh, God yes. [laughter] God yes. I think that depending on organizations—some organizations believe that they can bring in, and I’ll use sort of wild examples, but you can bring in plumbers and turn them into electricians, just by training them from the ground up. The thing is, is that people need to be intellectually curious, they want to learn and progress that way. So, trying to bring large groups of people through and sort of mass train them and see which ones stick is not really what I’m about.

Megan Hannay:
Yes.

Gregg Stewart:
I try to find and empower managers that understand their people, and that basically what can get their people to a new level for themselves, and they’re challenged and feel good about those types of things. I will probably never go back into a large holding company-size company because the practices there are just not in lock-step with my belief in terms of developing culture.

Megan Hannay:
I agree with you. I feel like I’ve found that, too. I always compare work life has some weird relationships with dating, because I feel like people always tell you who they are at the beginning. You know what I mean? I mean, whether it’s someone you’re dating or someone you’re employing or something, that you can grow a person to a certain extent, but you also have to put people where they are indicating they are and actually want to be.

Gregg Stewart:
I think you have an interesting analogy, as somebody who’s re-entered the dating world after being married 30 years, due to a death in the family. It’s interesting from the standpoint of everybody’s on their best behavior when you first meet, and that’s a lot about the hiring process. And it’s about understanding, trying to see beyond that, to see what makes the person tick as opposed to just what are the things that they’re trying to impress you with, if that makes sense. I always find that as you’re interviewing people, if you start to understand three core things, you’re usually served well. And they were taught to me by one of my mentors. It’s can they do the job, in other words, do they have the skills? Will they do the job? Do they have the initiative? And how will they fit in? I spent way too much time in my early career hiring stars. Now these are people that came highly recommended, they were subject matter experts, and the thing is that when I put them all together in sort of a high-performance organization, I learned that they just wanted to fight with each other to prove who was smarter than the other one. So, the how will they fit in has become probably the most important piece to go through. And that, there are some great examples out in the marketplace where companies do that. Facebook and Google are good at that, so there’s a lot of cross development when you’re in the interview process. You don’t just go meet with one person, you go and meet a half a dozen different people, because they want to see if you’re going to fit well on the team.

Megan Hannay:
It makes a lot of sense. It’s the fun kind of psychology part of working and leading a team that can be a lot of fun, too. And obviously, can have a huge effect on how you’re able to do your work. So, last question, I love to ask my guests about the place where they’re a local. So, you mentioned that you live on top of a mountain in Connecticut, so that sounds really interesting. What makes this Connecticut mountain unique to you and how did you end up there, and why did you decide to be a local there?

Gregg Stewart:
Oh, my goodness. I’m an outdoors person, and I’ve spent the vast majority of my career getting up on Monday and flying to the west coast and flying home on Friday.

Megan Hannay:
Oh, man.

Gregg Stewart:
I always wanted to go to a place on the weekends with my family that was really nice, and we were really lucky to find—we found a dream home that I sort of stalked for 14 years and it came on the marketplace. I had the ability to buy it so I did. The thing is, the reason I’m local here is because it’s beautiful, it’s relaxing, my kids have been raised here. They’re now gone, but it’s terrific community with people that are sort of real down to earth and a lot of fun. And it’s highly accessible. I’m just an hour and ten minutes out of New York City, so I can run to the airport in an hour and five minutes, or I can be in downtown Manhattan in a short period of time, but I can come back to this beautiful place where we had four bobcats three weeks ago. It’s kind of fun.

Megan Hannay:
That sounds pretty awesome. And I like how you were very—you really knew what you wanted. Kind of like, this is the house I want, and this is the place I want to live in, and why did you decide—if you were continuously flying to the West Coast, did you feel like you were just more of an East Coast person?

Gregg Stewart:
Yes. It’s not been just the West Coast. At one point I had 21 offices with one organization. I’ve been a road warrior for the past twenty-five years. When you run organizations, your job is to get out amongst your own people and your customers. So, I’ve always been running and going, so from that perspective, that’s a lot of fun, I get to see a lot of different communities, I’ve had a lot of opportunities and offers to work on the West Coast and live out there, or live in Europe, for example, but this has always been my home. I live within probably an hour of where I grew up. So, I love the Northeast. I’m a skier, I’m an outdoors person, I have hundreds of miles of trails around here to hike, so we do a lot of hiking and biking, and you’re used to your roots and my roots are here.

Megan Hannay:
Yes, it’s your place. It’s your place. If you were marketing to people in your town in Connecticut, if you were working with a national brand that wanted to target people there, what would you tell them to pay attention to? What makes people in that area distinct?

Gregg Stewart:
What makes people here distinct I think is they do really value the community. There are a lot of folks that are very in tune with the environment around here, not much changes here because we don’t want it to change that way. When I say change that way I mean building and such like that. There’s great innovation, we have fantastic schools, so understanding that community and respecting that community, the businesses that do historically well here, are the ones that are intertwined in the community.

The local car dealership that is on the Little League poster at the end of the field there, those people are the most visible in the community really do get the spoils of the business in this area, because these are the people that you go out with your kids when you’re growing up, and meet every week at their different sporting events. Then you get to know them and you get to know what their businesses are and you support them. New England is classically like that. I don’t think you’d see that kind of environment if you went to the West Coast, for example, where there’s a lot of transient people. The thing here is sponsorships work well, underwriting the local arts organizations works really well because those are highly visible spots for different brands in these local marketplaces. And there’s a great example of that’s going to work here in Fairfield County, I guarantee it won’t work in LA County. Different tactics based on the area.

Megan Hannay:
Well, that’s cool. I haven’t spent much time in Connecticut but it sounds really neat. Gregg, thank you so much for your time and for being on The Zip today. You have some really good points and I really liked hearing your perspective on local marketing, so thank you.

Gregg Stewart:
Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about it. Local’s been in my blood forever, and it’s a lot of fun.

Megan Hannay:
Awesome. Thanks. All right. So, that is the end, I will wrap up after this. Than you, and I hope that I will run into you at some sort of local-related event at some point, because it would be great to meet you in person.