See how this north Texas town utilizes analytics to talk to retailers.
Celina, a farming community in Texas, partnered with Buxton to identify who it was as a city, who its residents were and what their shopping habits looked like. Nearly ten years later, Celina proudly uses Buxton's data to begin the conversation with many retailers and restaurants to diversify the retail mix and increase the quality of life for its residents. Since partnering with Buxton, Celina has successfully recruited retailers and restaurants such as McDonald's, Dickey's Barbecue Pit, Subway, Kwik Car, CVS and more.
Corbett Howard, I am the executive director of the Celina economic development corporation.
Celina is a farming community established in 1876. Celina came from Celina Tennessee. Settlers came from Tennessee and moved into the Celina area. When the railroad came through in 1876, they moved down by the railroad, and that began the future of Celina.
The first time that I met Buxton, they had a representative that contacted me, called me, and I was mayor of Celina at the time, and he contacted me and said “I would like to come out and visit with you on what Buxton does.” He said “Do you have any idea who lives in Celina?” I don’t have any idea. We don’t have any idea who our population is.
We visited, and I was pretty intrigued by that concept. At the time, they called it a small community ID. It would identify who we were. If you don’t know who you are, you don’t know where you are going. And I was very impressed by what they could do, how they could begin to identify who you were, what your demographic looked like, who lives there, what do they make, who are they, what kind of shoppers are they. So because of that, I went back to Celina. That was the beginning of almost now a ten-year partnership with Buxton Company.
There is a whole series of successes. I attribute that to data from Buxton that if I didn’t have, I couldn’t even open a conversation. They do projects for me. I have all the match reports for individual targeted retailers that we are qualified and quantified for. They load all that on my iPad, so I’m sitting there with a hard copy; I’m not worrying about any Internet. They make sure that I am armed with any information I need for an individual retailer. If I called them and asked them about an additional retailer, they go out of their way to help me and it’s pretty invaluable. I can’t speak for anyone, but their customer service is exceptional. So they tell you who you are and what kind of habits you have that literally zeros into what retailers are interesting for us.
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