Our tourism identity may be indistinct compared to Tennessee's other big cities and to the Smoky Mountain gateway towns just southeast of us. But would we really want to be associated with the baggage that goes along with being a typical tourist Mecca anyway?
What's Nashville's identity? What one or two, three at most, definable concepts or traits neatly sum up the city? Music City USA. Country Music Capital of the world. Capital of Tennessee.
How about Memphis? Elvis and Beale Street Blues. We could throw barbecue into the mix.
What is Knoxville's identity? Not so easy!
A city's identity is important. For residents, it helps provide a civic and cultural identity, anchoring them in a broader geographic and cultural context. It's also a large part of what entices people living elsewhere to visit a particular city, to seek out goods and services offered by businesses there, or to consider it an appealing place to establish or relocate a business or hold a convention. All those things mean money for a city.
Does Knoxville have an identity "problem?" It's been commented on in the local media through the years, overheard in local watering holes, struggled with by local tourism professionals. It was clearly evident 25 years ago when the city hosted the World's Fair, or Knoxville International Energy Exposition as it was called more formally. Reporters covering the event scarcely hid their amazement that this smallish city in the South that few had ever heard of could possibly pull off a World's Fair.
Awareness of Knoxville by the outside world has no doubt increased since the World's Fair, in no small part due to it, but it's still safe to say the city has a fairly indistinct identity to much of the world. Knoxville just doesn't coalesce solidly around one or two things the way the identities of Tennessee's two largest cities do. Is that a problem? Maybe. Maybe not. And maybe it's a good thing.
Comparatively Speaking
Knoxville's identity to many may be as home of the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee. But is "Home of the Vols" a sufficient identity for a multifaceted city of nearly 200,000 in a county with more than 400,000? Sufficient to draw people to the city for anything more than a sporting event or educational seminar? Sufficient to capture the soul of the city?
How about Gateway to the Smokies as Knoxville once billed itself? Does that still stand up? That identifier seems to have been successfully claimed by smaller towns closer to the mountains like Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, small towns that can also claim recognition for their respective clusters of family-oriented tourist attractions. From a 2008 list of Tennessee's Top 50 Attractions, ranked by their visitation figures and compiled by the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development, Dollywood and Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies rank numbers 1 and 2 respectively, and each town has several other attractions on the list.
Nashville and Memphis have numerous attractions on the Top 50 list. Chattanooga also fares well in tourist attractions. The Tennessee Aquarium is number 7, and the Chattanooga Choo Choo is number 11. Lookout Mountain Incline Railway, Rock City Gardens and Ruby Falls aren't far behind.
Once again, despite some wonderful attractions and amenities, Knoxville's tourism identity seems to pale in comparison. One must scan down the page of Top 50 Attractions until finally hitting #20, the Knoxville Zoo. The only other Knoxville entry is the Tennessee Theatre. Two Knoxville entries, one near the midpoint of the list and one near the bottom. And the list doesn't even count Graceland or the Nashville Motor Speedway, which means Knoxville's attractions are actually one or two slots further down.
Still, Knox County pulled in some $854 million from U.S. travelers in 2008, according to an economic impact report prepared by the U.S. Travel Association for the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development. Those tourism dollars generated 10,000 jobs and $293 million in payroll income. That puts Knox County at fourth in the state, behind not only the big two but also Sevier County. Knox County's tourist revenues account for only 6 percent of the state total. Davidson County (Nashville) and Shelby County (Memphis) together brought in almost half.
In terms of local tax revenue from such tourist activities, Knoxville reaped $20.4 million. That's considerable revenue but less than half what Sevier raked in, about one-fourth what Shelby put in its coffers, and approximately one-fifth of that secured by Hamilton County.
Of course, Memphis and Nashville are considerably more populous than Knoxville. But size isn't everything. The entirety of Sevier County is about half the population of the city of Knoxville.
Knoxville – It's All Here, Just For You, Enjoy!
Pressed for what she thinks tourists most readily associate with Knoxville, Kim Paul Bumpas, senior vice president of sales and marketing for the Knoxville Tourism & Sports Corporation, says KTSC's research boils it down to three general categories.
"Out-of-towners look at Knoxville for the unique natural beauty, for Americana music, and historical attractions," says Bumpas. "That's what they know Knoxville for."
Her answer at once highlights some of Knoxville's best features and illustrates the "problem" of Knoxville's identity. Are these elements too disparate or perhaps not strong enough on their own to provide that iconic Knoxville identity some residents desire?
Then again, maybe it isn't necessary for tourism purposes for the city to have that. Bumpas doesn't think it is.
"I don't think that's a bad thing [not having that kind of solid city identity]," says Bumpas. "I know, for instance, that when people think of Nashville, they think of country music. But if you talk to Nashville tourism professionals, they don't want to be thought of as just country music because they have all kinds of different things for you to see and experience."
Bumpas, a native of Memphis who's been in hospitality sales and tourism in Knoxville for nearly two decades, believes that not only can that sort of rock-solid, simplistic city identity crowd out awareness of other attractions, it can also create an image wholly unappealing to some people. Not everybody loves country music - or blues and barbecue, for that matter.
"We have the ability to kind of spread our message and not get pigeonholed," says Bumpass. "There are plenty of people who love blues and barbecue, for instance, thinking now of Memphis. But there are also people who hate it."
KTSC adopted in 2002 a marketing strategy that embraced the diversity of Knoxville's treasures rather than trying to fit them all into any one or two simple categories. KTSC created new cohesive marketing elements to serve as Knoxville's tourism identity touting the city's - well, everything. "Knoxville. It's All Here, Just For You, Enjoy!," and its accompanying tri-colored sun-over-mountains-over-water image and other color- and image-coordinated materials have proven successful and continue to be used, giving the city a consistent, ongoing tourist identity. And the accompanying imagery and messages can be adapted to entice whatever niche of tourists or conventioneers KTSC tries to woo to our city.
With no single attraction so popular as to guarantee massive, ongoing tourist attendance and no particular type of entertainment offerings sufficiently concentrated to provide a viable identity, Knoxville's identity is, rather necessarily, all of it: the landscape, the weather, the riverfront, the lakes, the music, the food, the festivals, the sports, the Sunsphere, the zoo, the history, the art, the museums, the theatres.
Maybe that's not just enough of an identity for Knoxville. Maybe it's a preferable one.
Knoxville. It's All Here, Just For You, Enjoy.
For more information about KTSC and the "Knoxville. It's All Here, Just For You, Enjoy!" campaign: www.knoxville.org
Knoxville Through The Ages
Knoxville's identity as a city has changed through the years, leaving it historically inconsistent and often indistinct - but always interesting.
Knoxville's "identity," that sometimes elusive cohesion of character and purpose that adheres to a city much the same way it does to a person, hasn't typically stuck to it firmly through the years. Originally, the city served as the capital of the Southwest Territory, eventually, of course, to be named Tennessee and established as a state in 1796. But the city lost that distinction in 1812, oddly enough gaining it back for one year in 1817, only to lose it again the next year for good.
Later, according to Heart of the Valley: A History of Knoxville, Tennessee, Knoxville was touted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as "Queen City of the Mountains," "Coal Market of the Southeast," and "The Largest Hardwood Mantel Market of the World," among other hopeful designations.
From 1910-1913, Knoxville proudly laid claim to its Appalachian heritage and gained considerable kudos nationwide for three large expositions held in Chilhowee Park. The third, and largest, of these was called the National Conservation Exposition. Though the Appalachian tag was dropped from this final Expo as apropos its ambitious scope, participants didn't shy away from the mountain-range identifier, as area residents would later.
Another late-19th/early-20th century Knoxville name was Marble City. Numerous quarries around the city produced considerable quantities of the striated building material, some of which gave form to buildings in our nation's capital.
Knoxville became one of several areas in East Tennessee to claim the "Gateway to the Smokies" title as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in the 1930s. As tourism development progressed in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge and other small towns southeast of here and closer to the mountains and park, Knoxville's gateway claim gradually subsided.
Knoxville picked up the nickname "Underwear Capital of the World" just as it was adopting its gateway identity. From the 1930s until the late-1950s, the existence of Standard Knitting Mills and some 20 or so smaller textile mills, many clustered close to downtown, kept Knoxville associated with "unmentionables." Perhaps it's too bad the textile products didn't live up to their quaint colloquialism. For tourism purposes at least, it would seem hard to come up with a much worse designation, though in 1947 a travel writer did when he tagged Knoxville "the ugliest city in America" in his book Inside America. The textile mills were part of his reason for doing so.
Luckily, another Knoxville identifier gained stature during this period. Knoxville had long been the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee, but its growth in enrollment and prestige after World War II brought additional recognition to the school and to the city of Knoxville. Today, "Home of UT" is a significant part of the Knoxville identity that provides the city not only sports fame but also a measure of intellectual heft and a color scheme, not to mention lots of sports-minded visitors and revenue.
In the late seventies and early eighties, a handful of optimistic Knoxville movers and shakers decided the city could host a World's Fair. The 1982 World's Fair, or Knoxville International Energy Exposition as it was called more formally, put Knoxville on the modern map more than anything ever had. Even today, the Fair provides a faded but still barely discernible cultural cache, and we continue to benefit from its architectural and landscape legacy.
Being able to rest upon its laurels as a tourist attraction remains a challenge for Knoxville. There will never again be anything so new and so big as a World's Fair by which Knoxville can stake its identity. But is that so bad? - By T. Wayne Waters
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Comments » 2
Digger writes:
What is Lexington's identity? What is Charlotte's? What is Jacksonville's? What is Louisville's?
It's not just Knoxville. Most mid-sized cities don't have that one word or phrase that identifies them to the rest of the nation. And I like it that way!
couldntresist writes:
UT and UT football. Period. 200,000 isn't all that big. This conversation only continues because people don't want to admit that.
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