Harold Hutcheson has served as the manager of the Conroe Convention & Visitors Bureau ever since the city of Conroe took control of the department in 2009 from the Conroe-Lake Conroe Chamber of Commerce.
Before Hutcheson joined the CVB, he worked as a creative director at an advertising agency for 20 years in New York City called Ogilvy & Mather, where he was the first Texan to work for the international company. Following Ogilvy & Mather, Hutcheson ran his own advertising agency for seven years before serving as national marketing director for Hewlett-Packard Co.
Hutcheson made a career change after leaving HP and went on to work in Huntsville for the Texas Historic Commission as its Main Street program manager before he accepted the manager position at the CVB.
What does the CVB do?
We are the advertising agency for the city. We spread the good word of the city and the area. In any given month, we run ads in publications like Texas Monthly, Texas Highways and Cornell Labs All About Birds. We are in [Texas] Parks and Wildlife [magazine], and four times a year we are in the [magazine’s] events calendar. Once a year we are in the annual Texas Travel guide.
We send out literature requests, which includes our visitor guide, our birding guide and our historic flight park guide. We also work with organizations on the I-45 corridor. We were one of the founding cities of the Houston and Beyond partnership, which is a collision of cities that are just on the fringes of Houston.
Is Conroe a tourism destination?
Yes. People are extremely interested in coming here. We do not have any of the numbers from before I came on [to the CVB], but we have watched our request for literature [counts] increase every year. Last year, we mailed out just shy of 41,000 requests for literature, and we do not send it as junk mail. The only way you become one of those numbers is by requesting literature.
What initiatives is the CVB undertaking this year?
To grow our number of requests [for literature], No. 1. We watched it drop just slightly from last year to this year. We have a visitors video that I am very proud of on our website at www.playinconroe.com, and I intend to revise that. We are also kicking off a new ad campaign that is based on historic posters. Historic travel posters have become something that is really popular, and we will be using them to help draw people to some of the more popular historic sites we have in Conroe. We are also working with the breweries in the area to put together a tour. There is so much that we do to promote Conroe, but we really want to stay in front of people and keep talking things up.
What brings the most tourism to Conroe?
Our history and nature is what brings people here. We are so fortunate to have nature wrapped all around us. We have the William Goodrich Jones State Forest to the south, which has an endangered woodpecker. People don’t realize what a draw birding is to this area. While it’s not in our city, people will come here because of the Lone Star Trail [in the Sam Houston National Forest]. It is 140 miles long and it is the longest continuous foot trail in Texas. People who live here do not even know that it wraps around our city. We also pride ourselves on being the center of a hub for historic tourism.
