Rochester, New Hampshire Uses Customer Analytics to Grow Their Community

My name is Karen Pollard. I am the economic development manager for the city of Rochester, which is in the seacoast of New Hampshire. Rochester is historically a manufacturing community, it has never had a lot of retail in it. It has a charming downtown like many New England communities do, but we really had a need as the community grew for a lot more retail to come in as amenities. When we first came up with our strategy, it was really clear that people didn’t know anything about Rochester and felt the community was too small and spread out to invest in. And that wasn’t going to get us very far. So on one of my first trips to ICSC, I found Buxton, this company that worked with retailers to help them choose sites. And they were able to rather quickly show me some facts about our community that I didn’t know and that I could use to sell our situation to investors. I am so excited about what we have done since going with Buxton. We started with them in 2007, the very next year we had our first new shopping center in the city in 25 years. We’re doing a lot of work on our downtown right now, we’re trying to bring more residents in. So we are working with Buxton on one of their new tools that they have just launched. And we’re going to make that available to several of our downtown businesses, so that they can market themselves to a broader audience. SCOUT is amazing because you can do custom reports for any retailer, and it will tell you consumer propensity information. You can pull day-time population numbers and traffic counts. It really can give you such a broad range of data, that information about who is there and who’s in the general area is so valuable to someone who is looking to invest millions of dollars in your community. Buxton has the best people, the best information, the best service. They will help you make your goals, and if I need anything, they are phone call away.