How Far Will the Cerritos City Council Go?

By Brian Hews

There is an often-used concept in advertising called the “Thin Market Advertising Strategy”. Basically, the concept says that a company selling a product that is not often bought-refrigerators, washer/dryers, one-time event tickets-must constantly advertise so when a person finally decides to buy those goods, that company has been in front of them so often that they will buy from them.
That is why you see Target, Sears, JCP, Macy’s, Best Buy, Kohl’s Wal-Mart, and all other retailers in your newspaper every Sunday. They are well aware of the Thin Market Concept. They never cut back on advertising-even during hard economic times-because they know you can’t cut your way to profits; you have to advertise to increase revenues.
According to Cerritos officials, ticket sales for the CCPA for the  2010-2011 season was $4,634,318; for the 2011-2012 season it was $3,825,119, a drop of more than $809,000 or 19%.
According to CCPA Executive Director Dianne Cheney, they cut the print/radio/cable advertising budget for the 2011-2012 season. The Thin Market Concept dictates that sales will drop and they did, a whopping 19%.
Fast forward to this budget session for the 2012-2013 season. If Cerritos Council did their homework, they should have known about the decline in sales at the CCPA. But council, in its’ Barrows initiated collaborative effort to throw Los Cerritos Community News under the bus for truthfully reporting his assault on resident Jay Gray, spent twenty minutes out of a ninety minute budget debate on the print budget, and then inexplicably cut the print ad budget in the face of those declining sales.
I am sure that the staff at the CCPA was quite disappointed when they heard Pulido and Barrows vote to cut the print ad budget with Pulido saying, “inclusive of the CCPA budget”, but they are good soldiers and will go along with any Coucnil decision, no matter how myopic or uninformed.
Given this action, we now have no way of knowing how far the Barrows-led council will go to silence opposition or debate, even taking action to hurt sales of the venerable CCPA.
If they are unafraid to intentionally inflict collateral damage because they were opposed and called out in the Los Cerritos Community News, we could only imagine the other actions they might take when they feel threatened.