Marketing meeting

I went to a Town Hall meeting about marketing St Leonards last night. I didn’t know anything about it until a day or so before, so had no idea what to expect, but assumed it would be about marketing St Leonards. From my point of view, which I think is the SBA point of view, marketing St Leonards should have the aim of getting a higher footfall of customers in the area. What we want is an identity for St Leonards distinct from Hastings, and to use that to make St Leonards a destination in it’s own right.

The Council view?

Councillors and council officers took a different view. They think we should be happy to be included as part of Hastings, and pointed to the way they were doing this.

Things like forgetting to put us on the map going out in a new council publication. Things like giving us a whole page in that publication. (They couldn’t say how many pages in the publication, lets guess about 100. We get a whole page.?) Things like setting up a website which we could then leave for 2 years. (After which we presume the HBC officer in charge of cleaning cobwebs off websites might book us in, perhaps in 2015?)

What shall we do?

St Leonards doesn’t want independence, we aren’t going for Devo-max even. We just feel that promoting our own identity will be a positive benefit to any marketing, that some marketing will improve footfall and that being promoted as a suburb, even a nice suburb, of Hastings just isn’t enough.

Which means that we do it ourselves. To find out what you want, what you feel might work, how you feel you could contribute I have set up a forum on a website. The website is a suggestion for a St Leonards website, but there will be lots of other ways of marketing.

Thw website is here: http://thestleonardsonsea.co.uk/

The forum is here: http://thestleonardsonsea.co.uk/forum/

(You have to enter your name and email to use the forum. This is to deter computer made spam. Your details will not be used to spam you or given to anyone else.)