Promoting Your Market

Hello from the frozen tundra of Rochester, NY. Joan Hildebrand here to talk up marketing your market.

A little about me: Former broadcast journalist, former non-profit agency executive and now Marketing Special/ Events Coordinator for the City of Rochester Public Market..been doing this gig for about four years.

So here is how I think this is gonna work. I post. You comment. Together we try to generate ideas and interest in our markets that will accomplish our goals: more shoppers, more vendors, a surge in revenue.

Now I realize that not all markets are the same. Some are small, some are big..some year round and some seasonal. Your needs may not be my needs. You may not have the capacity to implement some of the suggestions made. Don’t get frustrated. Your feedback is going to drive this bus and if I am not addressing your critical issues, leave a comment and a correction will be made.

So what do we talk about first?

There seems to be a lot of buzz around market tasting. How to do it, why should you do it, where to do it? At the Rochester Public Market (RPM) we just, this year, started offering this type of promotion. For the last three years we have had guest chefs from area restaurants come and do recipe demonstrations but we were not licensed to let the public join in the fun and taste the final culinary delicacy.

How bad was that? Here’s this top rated chef cooking up an absolutely sumptuous creation and no one could eat it except the staff. We were really happy, the public wasn’t. The fact that people would come back week after week to just watch the demonstration proved that the demand was high for this type of promotion.

Did I mention that the chef had to get at least 80% of his ingredients from that days market vendors? A recipe is always provided and customers are encouraged to go shopping after the demo to prepare the meal for their family at home. For the single ladies, I call them “snag-a-man” meals. ( Hey! There’s an idea for a fun promotion).

So here is the set up: One chef, one grill ( we don’t have a kitchen to use) lots of great fresh and healthy ingredients. We have a set of bleachers where people can sit. Demos run about 30 minutes. We do two demos each Saturday. One at 10am and another at 11am. Demos are done each week, same time, same place. People now know where to go and when.

We try to book our chefs in advance as much as possible. This helps in getting media coverage. As soon as we have a booking, I send a media release out. For the smaller markets, try having celebrity chefs: the Mayor, the Police Chief, anyone and everyone who can cook and draw a crowd. Staff does the set up, staff does the take down. We try to treat our guest chefs like royalty and some of them are pretty serious about their demos. It all adds to the fun!

Getting the tasting permit was pretty easy with our county health department. We met their requirements, filled out the form, paid the $150.00 dollars and we are good to go for 2010. No hassles, no worries.

The public has come to love our tasting events. We get calls asking if there is a tasting event planned and what is on the menu. Our media coverage is excellent particularly when we create a larger tie-in.

Example: January is National Soup Month. So our resident home economist Margaret O’Neill came up with a soup recipe using only market bounty. We called it “Public Market Soup or PMS Soup…guaranteed to warm your innards and keep those winter blues at bay! Once the call of “Soup’s on” was made, we had folks lined up out the door and ended up serving over 150 samples. Received coverage in the local paper and two television stations showed up to interview Margaret.

Just goes to show..sometimes a little thing like a cup of soup can generate a tremendous amount of buzz.

That’s it for now. Write soon. See you at the market. jb