Aurora Sister Cities and the On Havana BID handed us a six-line brief — one vision, one mission, three goals — for the Korean district along Havana Street. We turned it into research, audiences, programs, technology, and a sequenced three-year marketing plan. Aurora kept us on for three more years.
Korea Town Aurora was already there. H-Mart anchoring Parker and Havana. Sixteen restaurant concepts from the corridor's unofficial mayor. A Korean population nearly double the Colorado average. A 33-year tie to Seongnam.
What it didn't have: a name a non-Korean Aurora resident could repeat. A landmark you'd drive across town to photograph. A reason for Buckley Space Force Base, Anschutz Medical, or Raytheon to think of it as anything other than lunch.
So when the RFP landed in 2022, we answered it as a place to be built — not a wordmark to be shipped.
Cities usually get a brand book and a wave goodbye. We ran the full design-thinking loop under a placemaking discipline that says you build the place itself — not just its promotion.
Before any pen touched paper: a community survey across Korean residents, business owners, and non-Korean Aurorans, plus stakeholder interviews with the ASCI Korea Working Group, BID directors, and the restaurateurs who built the corridor. The answer that set the tone — locals wanted the district to feel legitimate before it felt grand. Start small, but real.
We led field visits to Koreatown LA and Koreatown Orange County with the On Havana BID and ASCI boards in tow — and added a stop at Seongnam City's business center to make the sister-city connection literal. Every observation was written back to the plan, page by page, in a ten-page implementation report.
Credit where it's due: the Korea Town Aurora brand mark was already in place, built by a talented local designer — our scope was the strategy around it. We authored the umbrella campaign — "Aurora's Passport: Discover the Cultural Gem of Colorado" — architected to evolve across years and topics, plus named programs: Bibimbap Food Week, the Mascot Contest, the Daesa Program, a K-AI chatbot, and the Moonshot landmark.
A 7-section website architecture with a Korean / English / Spanish trilingual layer and an OpenAI chatbot fine-tuning spec; four public-art landmark options (Korean Drum, Interactive Janggu, Hanok Gate, a mural program); event collateral and price modeling for Bibimbap Food Week — concepts pushed into the contexts they'd live in, so stakeholders could vote on something real.
The deliverable wasn't a brand book. It was a three-year marketing plan tied to an Aurora–Seongnam economic strategy — linking Aurora's aerospace, defense, and medical employers to Seongnam's Pangyo Techno Valley. And we never fully left: we still send same-day briefings when a competitor moves.
The survey resolved into four data-driven personas. Every program in the plan is aimed at one of them by name.
Hunts new flavors and gastrodiplomacy. Drives the Bibimbap Food Week strategy.
Festivals, art, heritage. Anchors the Chuseok and Lunar New Year programming.
Wellness, K-beauty, slow visits. The audience for the Local Guides program.
Events, nightlife, landmarks. The Moonshot Project is built for them.
It was excellent — and you clearly put lots of work into it. We heard nothing but compliments from all who attended.— Becky Hogan · Aurora Sister Cities, after the field-research report
Every phase has named programs, defined KPIs, and a recurring spine of events. Here is how the plan sequences across three years.
From "the area near H-Mart" to a named, branded district with a published positioning, four target personas, and a three-year operating plan.
The Moonshot drum and the Hanok gate gave Aurora something to fundraise around. Public art is the cheapest place identity money can buy.
The Aurora–Seongnam analysis bridged cultural exchange to economic development — and a model for a Korean Innovation & Cultural Center near H-Mart.
The LA and Fullerton visits became a methodology the city can re-run for any cultural district — without reinventing the work.
ASCI, the On Havana BID, the Korea Committee, and city economic development arrived at the same plan — not the same compromise.
The relationship didn't end at delivery. Three years, four mandates, and ongoing — including adjacent work like the Korean War Memorial concept.
