There’s a useful place for sales and marketing in commerce, but they’ve been applied mistakenly and ineffectually to Whitewater’s politics.
It’s been years and years of selling the town, with every tired expression about being a destination community, exceptional place to live, work, and play, etc.
Those who have pushed this tired approach won’t stop – it’s all they know, some believe it truly works, and some simply want others to believe it works (so as to receive credit for their efforts, however unproductive they truly are).
For those who believe, there’s a combination of situation and confirmation bias at work: the twin assumptions that where one is, and the like-minded people to whom one speaks, are evidence of universal conditions & acclaim.
Most of these low-quality sales pitches fail because unctuous pitchmen assume that prospects elsewhere are so gullible or so dim that they’re susceptible to…. low-quality sales pitches.
That’s false: most people are very sharp, and see through yet another stale presentation of exaggerations and distortions.
After these many years, of selling the city, various projects, and now even test scores as though they were miracle products, one would think that Whitewater would be a city of gold: El Dorado on Cravath.
If half of these pitches, claims, contentions, announcements, declarations, and special meetings had been half of what’s been claimed for them, we wouldn’t have had the need for still more pitches, claims, contentions, announcements, declarations, and special meetings.
A bright, shining exaggeration, so to speak, is still an exaggeration. The overwhelming majority of people – here and outside the city – know this. They’re more than able to see through the dull, hackneyed, and inflated.
We would do much better – for ourselves and our prosperity – to abandon disordered exaggerations for an accurate description of our small city.
Accurate is not inadequate – on the contrary, it’s the only description worth respecting, beautiful in itself.
When we embrace straightforward presentations – and one day that will be the only kind we’ll make – Whitewater will achieve truly the prosperity that crude sales pitches cannot provide.