It‘s the Berries: As an Economic Engine, The Cherry Festival Drives Northern Michigan to Bigger Things

No single event in Northern Michigan is as big or as heavily attended as the National Cherry Festival. Since its inception 76 years ago as a small celebration of the cherry harvest, the Festival today has grown into one of the largest and most popular community festivals in the Midwest.
The Cherry Festival‘s relevance to our community and cultural life stems from its original mission of promoting our local cherry industry to the world. At one time just about everyone living in Northern Michigan was dependent on the success of the cherry industry.
This year’s festival will look similar to those in recent years. The Blue Angels are back, the Williams Brothers are working on their parade entry, and the open space concerts will again have top entertainment from the 1964 Tribute, Lonnie Brooks and Edgar Winter. New this year will be the move of the main stage entertainment to Traverse Bay Entertainment in Williamsburg.
Cherry Festival Board President Barb Lemcool and Festival Executive Director Tom Kern took time to share their thoughts on where the Festival is at and where it is going as we continue to look at organizations that impact our area from a cultural and entertainment perspective.

NE: How has the National Cherry Festival help to shape our community identity? What is the cultural relevance of the Festival to our area?
Barb Lemcool: Everyone we meet seems to know of Traverse City and the Festival. Herb (husband and former board president) and I have traveled the country and even some other parts of the world and people know where we are located and often it is because of the Festival.
Tom Kern: The fact that we are known internationally as the Cherry Capital of the world is a direct result of the Festival’s popularity over the years. The National Cherry Festival has helped to shape the identity of our area internationally as well as locally because it is a representation of who we are as a community. The longevity of this event and its growth over 75 years mirrors the growth of Northern Michigan and the commitment of the people who live here to serve and give to others.

NE: How has the Cherry Festival made the area a better place to live?
Lemcool: The fact that the Festival promotes the cherry industry and that cherries have been and continue to be a big part of our area is certainly one obvious example.
Kern: If you look at the history of this event it was created as a promotional mechanism for area cherry farmers. During the 1920s through the 1950s the whole economy of the region was impacted by cherry industry. Every shop owner, tailor, every grocery store, essentially every business was dependent on the cherry industry. During the 1930s at harvest time shopkeepers would close their stores down and along with their employees to go help with the harvest. In the early days of the Festival the Cherry Queen would fly around the country and deliver pies to governors and even the President; that was how critical the promotion of the product was during those days.

NE: Do you consider the Festival to be a community event or a tourist attraction?
Lemcool: Certainly the Festival still fulfills it primary objective of creating awareness for the cherry industry. But our primary industry now is tourism, so as a festival we are also in the business of entertaining the tourist that is visiting the area. Yet our focus is on those who live in the community.
Kern: Barb is right, we try to create a balance to make it a community event for those who live and work here. We don’t actively market the event outside of the state, as we are a community festival. While we do market in some of the metropolitan areas of Michigan it is primarily to inform, not necessarily to bring people up here. The focus of the events and activities are for people who live here. A great example is the prince and princesses program. Often many are sons and daughters of prior prince and princesses. In some cases we even have kids whose grandparents were a prince or princess.

NE: Sometimes people will write letters saying the Festival should just be about cherries and not all these other events and concerts. In a sense haven’t you drifted away from promoting the cherry industry?
Kern: At one time the Cherry Festival was THE marketing arm of the cherry industry. Today it is the Cherry Marketing Institute that is responsible for marketing the cherry industry. We are their partner and just one of many vehicles they use to promote the industry. We have people say to us that we should only be about cherries, but we know that having these other events helps to bring people to the festival and from there they are exposed to cherries.

Cash Influx
NE: What about the economic impact the Festival has on the area?
Kern: First of all we have a budget and we spend between $1.5 million and $2 million dollars each year in the community. We spend that money locally with many locally owned businesses. It is very difficult to measure the economic impact of an event if the event is not gated to gather a realistic number of visitors. We have done some survey’s and estimate between 500,000 and 600,00 participate in the festival, many of those are counted several times, so the best estimate we have is that 150,000 people come to the Festival. A conservative assumption of every one of those visitors spent $20 for the week that would be $3 million dollars put into the community as a result of the festival.
Lemcool: That is certainly a conservative estimate. If you are visiting here there is no way you are only spending $20 for the whole week. We certainly are helping to contribute to the economy significantly during that week.
Kern: One consulting firm puts our numbers closer to $15 million dollars into the community during the Festival. We can’t prove any specific numbers. Do the hotels do well that week? Yes. Would they do well that week without us? Probably. Yet we are aware that several hotels and motels charge a Cherry Festival premium that week of $30 to $50 per room per day. So some are netting several thousands of dollars daily extra as a result of the Festival. So there are definite economic impacts from the Festival. We have heard that many of the fast-food restaurants have their best week of the year during the Festival. There are some negative impacts as there is evidence on non-economic activity during that week. If you talk to some of the downtown retailers that are not geared to large tourist crowds we know those businesses suffer. Not many people go to Captain’s Quarters during the Cherry Festival to buy a suit. Realizing that they have a Cherry Festival sale on shirts, shorts and other tourist type clothing that helps attract customers.

NE: The Cherry Festival has always prided itself on free or almost free events. Discuss the importance of this and your ability to maintain this type of festival in the future.
Kern: That has been one of the hallmarks of the event. The reason we have been successful with this is because of corporate sponsorships. As the cost of our events go up we have offset that with sponsors rather then passing that cost along to the festivalgoer. That is becoming more challenging. Last year we began incorporating some new fees for some things that previously were free. One example was asking people to buy a two-dollar lapel pin to gain admittance into the entertainment open space area. That was met with mixed reaction. People would say this was always free, why do we have to pay? There were a variety of reasons one being the cost of entertainment has tripled in five years. We can’t triple the fee of the sponsor because we really don’t have more people coming.

Gated Festivals
NE: This concept of a gated event and charging a flat fee like they do at other festivals, is that being considered?
Kern: As we look to the future we will have to give consideration to charging nominal fees for some of our activities and events to cover costs.
Lemcool: From a board perspective I think we are looking at gated areas in the future for adult activities and events. We will want to continue the family events and the kid’s events as free to the participants. We are pretty committed to always maintaining some free aspects of the Festival.
Kern: We have said to ourselves if we could get a dollar for every person that comes and watches the Blue Angels air show and one dollar from everyone who watches the fireworks we would be all set. We wrestle with the concept of getting some nominal dollars from everyone that participates. Gating the event in some way is probably the only way we could accomplish that, but I don’t know if we will get to that point or not.
Lemcool: It is a difficult issue and a lot of festivals are becoming gated events. We are unique in that we are one of the few festivals in the country of our size with so many free events and activities.

2,000 Volunteers
NE: One big key to the success of the Festival is the Ambassador Program. Why do so many people give so much time, in many cases working almost daily year-round to make the Festival happen?
Lemcool: I think the simple answer is they are having fun. I wouldn’t be doing this today if it wasn’t a lot of fun and the other people I work with were not such great people to be with. At times there have been close to 40 members of Lemcool family assisting a part of. We have ambassadors from all over the country who come back for to help for Cherry Festival week.
Kern: I am constantly amazed with the numbers of people who help year in and year out. Tim Allgaier just retired after 28 years of coordinating the beverage pavilion. Another aspect is our community share program where community organizations provide volunteers and in return we make donations back to their organizations totaling over $40,000 annually. Between the two programs we have about 2,000 volunteers, and that is amazing considering number of people who live in the area. There are events in major metropolitan areas that can’t draw 2000 volunteers. We have really helped to set the voluntarism bar in the community and the positive experience people have volunteering for the Festival has led many to volunteer elsewhere in the community.

Too Big?
NE: About 10 years ago there were a few in the area who felt that the Festival was getting to big, maybe a little arrogant. You took steps to look at the Festival and ask the community to participate in looking at the event. Do you still have annual meetings with community members to gain input?
Kern: I believe it gave us a big wake-up call. We realized as an organization that we could never do that again. We know that we can no longer become complacent or so sure of ourselves that we are not willing to take a step back and look critically at ourselves. Yes we still do the community forum each year. In the last five years less than a half-dozen people have shown up. It would be easy to say well everything must be fine no need to have these anymore. The last thing we will ever do is to eliminate this forum, even if only one person shows up. We know that our event has some negative impact on people in the area. If you live in the staging area of our three parades you might not like what we are doing, but we figured out ways to listen to the community and minimize inconveniences.
Lemcool: We also have a retreat with the directors and staff to review each festival. This year we started interviewing stakeholders in the community from government leaders, tourism leaders to people of local industry to get their feedback.

NE: What about claims by some that the Festival has become too commercial?
Kern: People want the events to be free, but they also want it to be non-commercial. This is not possible. While people come down and see sponsorship banners and inflated displays and don’t like it they do like that the event is free or almost free. There is no free lunch and costs to put on the festival continue to rise. We either continue with corporate sponsors or we charge for the events and activities.

NE: What about plans to make the Festival bigger?
Lemcool: There are no plans to increase the number of participants. In fact the Festival today is no larger then it was 10 years ago as far as the number of attendees.
Kern: The main focus from the board to the staff was to improve the quality of everything we do not to make the Festival larger. A good example of this was in 1991 we had a broken down trailer for an entertainment stage and only spent $1,500 per night for shows at the open space. Overtime we have improved the stage and last year we spent $125,000 on entertainment for the week.

$300,000 Per Show
NE: You eliminated your paid entertainment program and have partnered with Traverse Bay Entertainment; why the change?
Kern: First Traverse Bay Entertainment has been a major sponsor of our entertainment in past years. The primary reason for the change comes down to simple economics. The cost of quality entertainment has risen to above $300,000 dollars for most shows, so we are now risking 10 dollars to make one dollar. It just didn’t make sense to continue they way we were doing it. There is less room for error and we really don’t have the facility for it. This new partnership will allow for quality entertainment at less of a risk for all of us.
Lemcool: This change will also eliminate a lot of pressure and allow us to concentrate on what we are doing downtown.

The Future
NE: When you surveyed local community leaders what sort of visions for the future did you and they share for the Festival?
Kern: There are a lot of major changes on the horizon for the Festival. Some are not in our control. Like this summer a lot of construction at the marina and the new break wall. When you look at the next five years there will be a total revamping of the marina, the decommissioning of the power plant and the removal of that building. We will lose half of the area where the carnival is located. We will be moving out of our offices and this building will come down. This will all impact how our event looks in the future. We asked people to imagine as if they were to stand on top of the Fifth Third Bank building overlooking the open space and the parkway what they wanted to see during the festival week 5 or 10 years from now. When you get down to it, this is a community event so in reality the community should be involved. We didn’t hear anything that surprised us yet.
Lemcool: Some of it is very doable. I am not sure if shutting done the parkway in the future is feasible but some have envisioned that.
Kern: People visualize keeping everything centrally located so they envision closing down the parkway to keep everything within walking distance. We have people telling us a gated event makes sense. Not only would we be able to charge a fee and downplay the commercial aspects we would be able to create a secure environment. We have had some ideas internally but have been afraid to bring them forward as it might scare some people.
Lemcool: We told people to wipe the slate clean and visualize. It is very exciting.
Kern: There are parts of the Festival that are tradition and will always be apart of it, the cherry promotion, the parades, kids events. However the Cherry Festival needs to reinvent itself or it will die. Two of the most popular events today are the Blue Angel Air Show and the big name concerts and both were not here 10 years ago.

NE: After 10 years as Executive Director what is your personal vision for the Festival?
Kern: I see by 2015 a gated festival that goes from Division Street to the river. Down by the Elks Club is gigantic music stage in the middle of the parkway with food and beverages. Between there and where the current Light & Power plant is we would have a midway and kids activities. The open space would have food, beverages and another entertainment stage. Down by where the river feeds into the bay we would have another stage and along the way would be a gigantic art fair all week long. You buy a button and it would be good for the whole week. There would be something going on all the time from 10 am till 11 pm. Kids under 12 would be free. This is my vision and not necessarily reality.

NE: Barb a final thought on the future of the National Cherry Festival:
Lemcool: We are asking people to fantasize about the festival of the future and share it with us. We plan to be here for many years as interregnal part of the community. The Festival was founded on the principle of promoting who we are as a community. Things may change up north but the role of the Festival today and in the future will always be a reflection of who we are and how we live. 
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