With the Right Target Audience, a City Sells Itself

Tourists, sports leagues, and splashy headlines won’t build your city. Residents will.

Walk through just about any city center and you’ll start to see it.

Upscale hotels. Polished entertainment districts. Public spaces that feel curated more for photo ops than actual life.

Cities are spending big to land global HQs, host championship events, and build downtowns that appeal to tourists and suburban visitors.

And when it works, the result is what I call the Playground Effect. Downtown starts to feel like a theme park version of the city. It photographs well, but it doesn’t actually function for the people who live there.

From the outside, it all looks like good strategy: Foot traffic is up. Travel magazines take notice. Maybe there’s even an HGTV show about flipping or buying (and renovating, of course) houses in your suburbs.

But who is it really for?

We know the answer, and it’s not the people who live there.

Here’s why that matters:

What Every Marketer Knows (and What Most Cities Forget)

Anyone who's helped run a successful business knows that attention isn’t the goal. Smart marketers focus on lifetime value. Not just who clicks, but who sticks.

The people who stick around spend more, engage more, and cost less to retain. It's way more efficient to deepen loyalty with a current customer than to chase new ones over and over again.

Cities miss this. They chase headlines, ribbon cuttings, and one-off wins. It makes for great campaign ads if you’re looking to leverage your city council spot toward a run for higher office, but the value doesn’t last.

It’s kind of like when The New York Times bought The Athletic a few years ago as a way to buttress its subscriber count.

Sure, the numbers looked good. But how many of those readers actually started engaging with the core NYT brand? The $550 million price tag didn’t buy loyalty. It bought a spike on a spreadsheet and helped some executives save their jobs. (And I say this as an overall fan of The Athletic…)

Cities fall into the same trap. They build revitalization strategies around surface metrics. A packed concert venue. A boost in hotel stays. A fully booked convention center. But what’s left when the crowd leaves?

They’ve just bought their own inflated subscriber count. A flash of attention, with no lasting connection.

Your Core Users Are the Ones Who Live There

That’s the real miss. In business, acquiring a new customer can cost five to twenty-five times more than keeping an existing one. So why are cities overbuilding for the four-day visitor and under-investing in the 40-plus-year neighbor?

Tourism and attracting flashy external investments aren’t even the problem, per se. And solving the problem doesn’t actually require abandoning either; plenty of successful companies serve a multiple audiences.

The problem is that when you get down to the root of it, tourists and major corporations looking for the next new HQ sweetheart subsidy are not who a city is for. They’re a secondary audience.

Tourists matter. So do suburban shoppers, big events, and corporate relocations. But your city shouldn’t be designed around them.

It should be designed for the people who live there.

Residents are your daily users. They’re the actual tax base. They’re the small business owners and community-builders. They’re the ones who turn a street-corner bakery into the spot tourists start searching for five years later.

They’re invested. They’re the people with lifetime value.

When you build for them, you end up with a place that everyone else wants to be part of too.

And this isn’t just some sappy plea to think of the little guy. It’s basic sales and marketing principles in action.

Build for the Core, and the Crowd Will Follow

Apple didn’t try to make the MacBook appeal to everyone. They focused on a specific kind of person: someone creative, independent, and a little different. And it worked. It won over the true artists and creatives, and millions more who wanted to feel like that described them.

People didn’t just buy a laptop. They bought into an identity.

Cities can do the same thing. When decisions around things like housing, public space, safety, and transportation are centered on the people who live there, you create something more than infrastructure. You create a lifestyle. And over time, that lifestyle becomes a brand.

Not the kind of brand you fake. The kind that builds itself from the inside out.

A real lifestyle brand — the kind that’s lifestyle first, and brand second.

When Cities Feel Like Home, Everyone Wants In

When a city works for its people, it becomes magnetic. Not just for visitors, but for future residents, founders, artists, and families.

It doesn’t feel like a performance. It just feels like a good place to live.

Streets stay clean and quiet because they were designed for quality of life. Housing gets built at a pace that keeps prices in check. Transit works well enough that cars become optional. And neighborhood shops and cafes aren’t built for someone else. They’re built for you.

The city isn’t chasing tourists. But the travel brochure writes itself. Everyone wants to come experience what it’s like to live like a [insert what you call someone from your city here], even if just for a few short days.

Cities don’t need bigger attractions or splashier slogans. They need a clearer sense of who they’re really building for.