Newest Collaboration - Updated Downtown Durham Guide & Walking Tour

First published nearly 20 years ago with nearly 1 million copies in distribution, the newest annual update of DCVB’s Downtown Durham Guide & Walking Tour is also the newest collaboration with Downtown Durham Inc. (DDI) a private, non-profit, advocacy group partially funded by the City and County.

Along with many other improvements, the update includes a route map of just-launched Bull City Connector, a fare-free bus route running from Duke University to Golden Belt, which was also created by DCVB in another collaboration with the City of Durham and the Durham Area Transit Authority.

One of many reasons DCVB stands out in the minds and hearts of Durham residents as benchmarked in scientific public opinion polls is because it has always worked hard to leverage its mission with partnerships and collaborations.

Like other editions, DCVB’s in-house graphics designed and produced the updated Downtown Durham Guide & Walking Tour, as it did helping DATA and the City of Durham with marketing the new Connector . DCVB will also include 65,000 copies of the new Downtown Guide and a flyer about the Bull City Connector in bi-weekly distributions of its other literature to more than 100 outlets including all hotels, shopping malls, healthcare and transportation centers.

As an aside, for those interested in how an “overarching community brand” works, notice both the overall Durham brand signature and the Downtown neighborhood signature on the cover of the Walking Tour. Individual logos for the two sponsoring organizations are on the back.

An even clearer “best practice” use of a community’s “overarching” brand is the way the City of Durham and the Durham Area Transit Authority deployed the Durham brand signature, “Durham-Where Great Things Happen, on the website, literature and transit coaches (click to enlarge image above) for the Bull City Connector.

The term “overarching” means the brand is an umbrella that stretches over or encompasses all individual brands in the community including businesses, non-profits, universities, agencies, neighborhoods, faith communities etc. The signature is just an element distilled from the community’s distinct core values and personality traits.

Naturally DCVB, as Durham’s marketing agency, is the facilitator for the community’s overarching brand, which in a few short year is now showcased by nearly a thousand other Durham organizations in tens of thousands of applications.