Features

by Blake Krantz

Joe Prestejohn has been working at Cabot’s Ice Cream since 1969, when his parents founded the business at its current location on Washington Street in Newtonville. He was 11 at the time, but since then, little has changed. A small red and white sign marks the storefront on the busy street, and inside lies a colorful board of flavors. Customers lounge in red vinyl booths, laughing and talking over sandwiches or tall milkshakes, while employees bustle in and out of the “open-kitchen” environment, as Prestejohn calls it. Everyone wears a smile.

Image courtesy of Cabot’s Restaurant’s website.

Long ago, Prestejohn’s father owned a restaurant in Boston, but he lost the place in a fire. Fortunately, Cabot’s has not only survived but has flourished, becoming a favorite destination among Newton families and a glowing example of entrepreneurial success. Few small businesses are so fortunate, however. So how do small businesses like Cabot’s survive in competition with many other local businesses with diverging and constantly evolving marketing strategies?

For Cabot’s, the contagiously friendly atmosphere behind the front door has proven a key to success. “It’s kind of like a show,” Prestejohn explained, “the openness of the whole inside, you could be over here and see someone over there,” adding that, “we are an old-fashioned ice cream parlor type of place, and we want that feel.” With this in mind, Cabot’s has thrived for decades, outlasting hundreds of Newton businesses that have risen and fallen in prominence.

However, much has changed from a marketing perspective since Cabot’s first opened its doors. Internet advertising has become ubiquitous, rendering some small businesses incapable of competing for customers and some able to sustain a community presence indefinitely.

The American Marketing Association altered its definition of marketing in 2004. Robert A. Sevier wrote for University Business in his article “A New Definition of Marketing” that “changes in technology, an increased awareness of the importance of customers, and a greater understanding of lifetime value began to be felt in the profession.” The new definition now sets the standard for all small businesses. It reads: “Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing consumer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” With an astounding number of small businesses owners vying for consumer attention, this idea of an “organizational” commitment to marketing and “managing consumer relationships” proves critical to success, according to Sevier.

The increase in advertising opportunities online naturally has business owners working as hard as ever to provide this “value” of the new definition, an effort that Forbes writer Nicole Leinbach-Reyhle feels goes all to often unappreciated. For Leinbach-Reyhle, the commitment that small business owners demonstrate on a daily basis should be recognized with consumer attention.

In her article, “Why You Need to Support Small Businesses,” Leinbach-Reyhle writes, “when you consider how many small businesses surround you in your everyday lives, it is impressive to think about the amount of time, commitment, and labor these hard working individuals contribute to make their small businesses both come to life and stay alive.” This effort will likely never change, although its emphases constantly do.

Marketing efforts in particular perpetuate the presence and relevance of many local businesses. Simply look around at the businesses entering and exiting the nearest commercial block. Marketing strategies are strenuous, diverse, and essential, with someone always next door, down the block, or a five-minute drive away striving to compete for publicity.

For Prestejohn, one key aspect that differentiates a business is to actively establish attachment to the community. “I think that the community image is very important. It’s who we are. We live in this community, I grew up in this community, I went to school in this community. This is a great town, a great city. I feel like I am connected to it,” Prestejohn said with a smile. As the owner of a Newton business who speaks at local schools and volunteers at the Boys and Girls Club among other local organizations, Prestejohn is truly “connected” with the Newton community.

Prestejohn has simultaneously never stopped working tirelessly to develop new flavors for a menu which seasonally evolves, to the delight of many of these loyal community members, and hopefully, many new ones who become “engaged” with Cabot’s on social media, as Prestejohn said. “You can’t assume that everyone knows you,” he emphasized about the dangers of complacency in marketing the location and its products.

Founded just a few years ago by two students from Boston College, Heartbreak Hill Running Company is also making connections with members of the community on a daily basis, in a more physical manner. Heartbreak Hill organizes events for local runners, eliciting a feeling of togetherness that draws people back time and time again. Posters in the store highlight the weekly “Firehouse Run” in Newton, during which new runners are often congratulated on Facebook or Twitter. The message then continues to spread with photos and other posts online.

Marathon runners pose with Heartbreak Hill Running Company’s famous gorilla. Image courtesy of Heartbreak Hill Running Company and South End Athletic Company.

Heartbreak Hill also has a mascot, Bill the Gorrilla. Every Saturday, Bill talks to local community members outside of the store, takes photos, and simply draws attention from cars and pedestrians alike. People become visually, and often emotionally, connected with the store, its products, its events, its employees, who are often runners, and especially Bill, the epitome of small-scale streetfront advertising.

Store manager Louis Serafini wants customers to relate to the store by more than their wallets, whether it be as a frequent participant in running events or someone who wants to learn about training for a marathon. “If someone comes in here to ask questions, they are just as valuable as someone who is coming in to drop four or five hundred dollars on running apparel,” he said, elaborating that, “we try to provide an exceptional service here for what we do, and it is very specialized. People have a good experience here and they tell their friends and then send more people to come in and get that same experience.” For nearly all business owners, marketing revolves around factors less tangible than a product, such as the friendly conversation that takes place at Heartbreak Hill or the smiles of waiters serving ice cream at Cabot’s. Products are undeniably important, but there is much more to consider for small businesses, which rarely compete based on their prices.

Similarly, in an article from the Atlantic titled,“How Brands were Born: A Brief History of Modern Marketing,” Marc de Swaan Arons states that marketing should be based on more than products, which often cannot differentiate a business. Marketing solely a product can even be a failure to comply with the nature of modern marketing. De Swaan Arons writes, “as much as we like to complain about what we buy, it remains a fact that we live in a golden age for quality products. Today, it is much more rare to find cars that consistently break down or kiddie pools that leak.”

The storefront at Heartbreak Hill provides an example of unconventional marketing, even when Bill isn’t around. Two water coolers sit out front 365 days a year, attracting runners who constantly pass by on the street. The water exemplifies the community’s relationship with the store, and also creates awareness for the location when people stop to drink. One of the large storefront windows is covered with dry erasable marker with hundreds of names of local runners, another constant image of Heartbreak Hill’s visibly active marketing strategy in maintaining individual customer relationships. Optimally, these names will return for many visits.

If Cabot’s exemplifies a long-term established community business and Heartbreak Hill an up-and-coming young community business, Bodyscapes Fitness is a combination of the two.

Rob Shapiro, the founder of Bodyscapes, built the business’ first location in Newton Highlands in 1997 as an outlet for personal training in the community with a more “personalized” feel to studio fitness, as Shapiro explained. At larger gyms such as the YMCA, about 80 % of the customers do not regularly attend and are paying for memberships, according to Shapiro, a dynamic that Bodyscapes avoids in its now 15 locations.

From the first days of Bodyscapes, Shapiro, as well as Prestejohn and Serafini, developed a unique and successful business image that incorporates what Martin S. Bresser, a professor at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, labels the “five marketing variables” in Product, Price, Place, Promotion, and People.

Image courtesy of Bodyscapes website.

For Shapiro, the place was a gym that provided a “service and a nicer place to work-out, and an appointment-based business.” People would only pay for what they used, and upon expansion, Shapiro looked for towns and cities with similar consumer bases to Newton, such as Wellesley and Weston. Bodyscapes ran promotions through mail and the Newton Tab, and currently does charity work at a power-walk led by Silent Spring.

Perhaps most important of any of the five marketing values is “people.” As Bressler writes in his essay, “How Small Businesses Master the Art of Competition through Superior Competitive Advantage,” “managers need to recognize that employees throughout the organization should be responsible for customer satisfaction, and therefore managers should leverage employees to be the cornerstone competitive advantage” (6). Bressler emphasizes the fact that competitive success is not entirely in the hands of small business owners themselves, but is also in the hands of a business’s employees, who represent the business and market its products somewhat indirectly.

At Bodyscapes, Heartbreak Hill, and Cabot’s, employees fit this model to create an energy that perpetuates a positive image and allows each to remain competitive. As Shapiro said of the importance of Boydscapes’ personal trainers in achieving the business’ ambitions, trainers need to be “people that make it fun—you can have your PhD in exercise science, but if you cannot relate and motivate, you cannot be a trainer.” Bodyscapes benefits from word of mouth marketing from its clients due to these relationships and a “sense of community” at the gyms, the “best marketing” channel for Bodyscapes, according to Shapiro. This word of mouth strategy can be generated in other ways as well: Heartbreak Hill, for example, mentions specific runners and their accomplishments on its Facebook page, and these runners in turn commonly share such posts with friend’s and family. People’s satisfaction goes a long way.

Emotional marketing can further differentiate many small businesses. De Swaan Arons found weight in this idea, writing that marketing has always “required an understanding of the target consumer and what we call a ‘branded proposition’ that offered not only functional but also emotional value. Over time, the emotional value would create a buffer against functional parity.” De Swann Arons also explained that “a brand manager should be responsible for giving a product an identity that distinguishes it from nearly indistinguishable competitors.”

Nicole Leinbach-Reyhle concurred, stating that “while every business is different, what also makes customer care among small businesses more valuable is just that—being different.” Evidently, there are many ways to go about doing this. One example is seen in the “Birthday Club” that Prestejohn created several years ago, which provides a unique and personal service for Cabot’s customers. Every month, all Newton residents who signed up with birthdays within the month are sent an email that offers them a free ice cream sundae. The email includes “four or five little promotional things at the bottom,” Prestejohn explained, which people likely read along with the sundae offer. Serafini and Heartbreak Hill send out an internet and email newsletter 2-3 times per week, and the business is always looking to add emails to the list.

Generally speaking, the smaller a business becomes, the more critical subtle marketing techniques are, with somewhat subconscious impressions formed by many customers. “Merely putting a sign out in front of your business and opening the doors to the public does not guarantee business success,” Bressler wrote, or, perhaps, simply posting a sale online for a product does not achieve desirable results.

Shapiro in particular stated the importance of focusing on a business’s own employees in subtly improving towards success, saying that it is essential that a new business owner “surrounds himself with really smart and talented people,” and that he avoids trying to handle every aspect of the business himself, as everyone is only “good at some things” as a human being. There is always room for individual improvement as a business with competitors, led by people of differing backgrounds.

These internal improvements ultimately trump the notion of competition. If a small business looks to its competitors instead of focusing on improving its own services, it is setting itself up to fail. Small businesses such as Cabot’s, Heartbreak Hill Running Company, and Bodyscapes Fitness survive based on unique ideas, characteristics, qualities, and services that are continually evolving while maintaining the intimate community feel that allowed them to succeed in the first place. Marketing is a reflection of what an individual business is offering itself, not what it is offering in comparison to others. As Prestejohn earnestly put it, “We stay focused on what we do. We try to accommodate [our customers] however we can. You can’t be everything to everybody, so we do what we do and we do it well. You don’t come here to get a pizza, because we wouldn’t sell a good pizza. You don’t come here for lasagna, because it isn’t something we do. You have to stay with what you do and do it well.”

by Amanda Powers

In 2008, Abigail Fisher applied to the University of Texas at Austin and was rejected. She claims that she was rejected because she is white. Fisher sued the university, and her case is now being considered by the Supreme Court.

She ended up attending Louisiana State University and has since graduated from law school. However, she has sparked a national conversation over the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Is this system working? Is it harming white students? What is the value of having a diverse student body? Should admissions officers focus on class rather than wealth? Is race-based affirmative action still necessary at all?

The affirmative action debate has coincided with the explosion of racial tensions on college campuses nationwide this year. Some argue that affirmative action is needed to provide opportunities for students of color, to create a diverse student body, and to allow students to learn from those of different backgrounds. Others, like Fisher, believe that it is taking spots away from qualified white students. And some say that affirmative action should be based on socio economic class rather than race.

Race-based affirmative action was created to develop diverse student bodies on college campuses, and to open up new opportunities for minority students. Much of the debate today is over whether or not students of color still need or deserve different treatment. Abigail Fisher would argue that we live in a colorblind society, and that giving opportunities to students of color is essentially taking those opportunities away from white students. However, others would argue this special treatment is no different from giving preference to legacies, athletes, or geographically diverse students and that it is impossible to ignore the racial inequality still present in our country.

Recently, as part of my work with a nonprofit that promotes social activism among Boston youth, I led a workshop on racial justice for a group of students, ranging from eighth grade through college. One of the first activities we did was called “Stand Up Sit Down,” in which one of my co-leaders read a prompt, such as “stand up if you think the Civil Rights movement ended racism,” or, “stand up if you have ever made a joke about race.”

Another prompt was, “stand up if you think affirmative action is necessary to make education equal.” About two-thirds of the group stood up. Afterwards, I asked all of the students to talk about why they reacted the way that they did. (For the purpose of this article, all of these students wished to remain anonymous.)

This chart shows the racial makeup of the United States in 2010.

A student at American University, who is African-American, says that she stood up for affirmative action during the workshop because, “I honestly don’t get arguments against a process that gives a chance for people of color to go to schools where the system has designed disproportionate advantages to white students to ensure their success and acceptance into college.” Her views are reflected in statistics about the racial divide evident in performance on the SAT. Many argue that this test, which is a major factor in college admissions, reflects race rather than academic performance. While white students average a score of 1576 on this test, black students achieve an average of only 1277. A higher SAT score, which is clearly more common among white students, gives those students an advantage in the college admissions process. The American University student makes the argument that race-based affirmative action is a way to level the playing field among many other aspects of the admissions process that directly benefit white students and harm students of color. Lee Bollinger, currently president of Columbia University, and previously president of the University of Michigan when it was sued in a case similar to Fisher’s over its affirmative action policy, agrees with this student’s view. In a speech at a symposium on “Education and Law” in response to critics of race-based affirmative action, he said, “What is the reality that we are trying to address in our society, including at colleges and universities trying to build diverse student bodies? It really is trying to overcome two centuries of legacies of discrimination and active disempowerment and wealth transfer.”

However, others, including some students of color, are in opposition to the way that affirmative action policies are currently being put into practice. A student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, who is a Black Lives Matter activist and is African-American herself,  said, “I sat down because I don’t think that the way affirmative action is being implemented today is benefitting those who need it the most and that there are other ways to make education much more equal than affirmative action.” This view is not uncommon: many people argue that affirmative action should be based on socioeconomic class rather than race.

A Newton North student, who is white, stood up during the workshop. She said, “I think that affirmative action can be a great way to level the playing field for students who have had less opportunity. It can give students a chance to succeed and recognizes challenges that minority students face.” However, at the same time, she explained, “affirmative action can be difficult because it often categorizes people by race alone and can fail to recognize privilege in other aspects of students’ identity.” This student recognizes concerns about economic inequality, but she is still supportive of the system of affirmative action as a whole.

I also spoke about Fisher’s case with Dr. Alane Shanks, who wrote her dissertation on the start of affirmative action at Harvard Medical School, and who has devoted her career to promoting diversity on college campuses. Shanks supports race-based affirmative action completely. But even Dr. Shanks—who said, “I think it’s very dangerous to take away affirmative action; it is working and improving access to higher education”—admits to having some qualms about the current system not reaching enough people and there needing to be other efforts besides affirmative action.

Sheryll Cashin, Georgetown University law professor and author of Place not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America, writes that current affirmative action policies, “create optical blackness but little socio economic diversity.” In reviewing Professor Cashin’s book, Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, references Cashin’s point that the achievement gap by income is twice the size of the achievement gap by race.

Following a 2003 Supreme Court case on affirmative action at the University of Michigan, many states, including Michigan, Texas, and California, have attempted to eradicate this issue by banning race-based affirmative action at their public universities. Because they can no longer use race in admissions, many universities have begun focusing on economic rather than racial diversity, and have created policies designed to narrow the socio-economic achievement gap. After race-based affirmative action was banned in Texas, public universities in the state began using a program called the “Top 10 Percent” plan, which guarantees admission to the students with the highest grades at every public school in the state, usually amounting to approximately 10 percent of students statewide. Students admitted through this program make up three-quarters of the incoming class. This program brings in more low income students, making the student body more economically diverse. Because applicants from every single high school are admitted, students from lower income backgrounds naturally become a part of the student body. The remaining quarter of the class is admitted in a more holistic manner, after a review of many other factors.

Some studies show that although there was an initial drop in students of color attending public universities in states where affirmative action was banned, the population rebounded and even exceeded the levels before the ban. Dr. Shanks was skeptical about these studies, saying, “If you look at the numbers of what’s really happened in all of those places, there’s been a big decline of students of color actually having access… because the number of people of color in the demographics overall in the United States has gone up, it makes the numbers look like they’re not as bad now as they were before… it’s not that it’s working; if you look at the actual percentage of student body, the percentage of students of color compared to the number of students in higher education has dropped, even if the enrollment numbers themselves have increased.”  For example, officials from the University of Michigan stated that minority enrollment dropped significantly after race-based affirmative action was banned in their state, in a brief filed in Abigail Fisher’s Supreme Court case.

The Top Ten Percent Plan was in effect when Abigail Fisher applied to the University of Texas at Austin, but she did not qualify academically for automatic acceptance. She claims that although she did not qualify based on the program’s academic standards, she still was more deserving of acceptance than some minority students who were accepted. Lillian, a Tufts student, spoke to this very prevalent attitude towards affirmative action. When describing her high school experience in “an affluent, predominantly white neighborhood,” she said, “I had a lot of friends who would complain about affirmative action because they felt it cheated them of a spot at some ‘elite’ university.” She said that until she got to college and learned about “systematic oppression,” she felt the same way.

In response to the argument that affirmative action takes spots away from white students like Fisher, Dr. Shanks said, “It’s like saying, ‘if only there wasn’t a handicapped parking space I’d have found a parking space, like the three handicapped parking spaces are the ones that would’ve allowed me to park.’  So I think it’s such a minimal amount.  If there was anything I could change, I would say add more spots rather than less.”

Dr. Shanks also discussed the way that racial diversity is valuable to these institutions, and not just its impact on minority students. She said, “there’s a way to see this [diversity] as asset-based;  that bringing different ethnic and racial groups adds to the breadth and depth of the learning community” In a homogeneous community, it is difficult from more than one perspective to be present. Diversity is important and necessary in our higher education system to ensure that students are exposed to varied perspectives and that they can utilize those different perspectives when they are called upon to solve problems.

Race is still extremely relevant in American society. Just this year, police brutality towards black men incited of the Black Lives Matter movement. Racist acts on college campuses have led to outrage and protest. At a Yale fraternity party, a member was reported to have turned away all students of color, saying the party was for “white girls only.” At Harvard Law School, portraits of black law professors were vandalized. At the University of Missouri, protests broke out after a series of racial incidents, including the use of harmful racist slurs, and what students felt was an inadequate response from the administration. As the debate over affirmative action plays out, colleges are trying to figure out how to address the issue of race.

Whether or not race-based preferences are struck down by the Supreme Court, race remains an important issue on college campuses and in American society. Bringing together people with different identities and backgrounds, whether they are diverse in terms of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, geographic location, educational background, or any other factor, is important and necessary in any community.

In the workshop I facilitated a few weeks ago, participants came from a variety of different backgrounds, and so they each brought a unique perspective to our conversations. Similarly, a diverse student body means that each student brings their unique background and experience to a college campus. Colleges and universities have a responsibility to ensure and promote diversity, in all aspects of student identities, on their campuses.

Whether or not the Supreme Court strikes down race based affirmative action, it is undeniable that diversity is beneficial to any community and that race is still extremely relevant in America today.