…and those other malls too.

Yeah, some of my Board will be having a cow over that headline. Hopefully, once the initial moment passes, they’ll be raising one at the Cow (or the Tavern, the Rueb, the Hideaway, the Eagles, the VFW, Chapati’s, Basil’s, B & L’s, Mandarin Garden, Hogan Brothers…) instead, toasting Downtown Vitality and the, let’s call it “assertiveness”, that it sometimes takes to work for that vitality.

That title was one of the ideas suggested to us for our Holiday Shopping Campaign. I’ll preserve the privacy of the creative genius (and downtown business and building owner) that came up with that line but I will hint that he’s married to an NDDC Board Member.

As I’ve tried to point out in my recent blogs over the past two days (Developing a Different Business Model and Get in the Groove for Quality), for independent businesses to compete with the big chains, they’ve got to be assertive. I believe that for independent business districts to compete with the corporate anchored malls, they also need to be assertive.

In an effort to give local businesses a boost during the crucial holiday shopping season, the NDDC is running a series in the Northfield News. A few of the ads are pictured below. The last in the series will run in the Wednesday, December 20th edition. Watch for it, who knows, maybe I’ll manage to slip in the “Flip the Bird to Burnsville” idea…