Samantha Motion: How Tenby Powell went from moving home to mayor in five months

The new Tauranga mayor Tenby Powell. Photo / George Novak

COMMENT:

Name recognition. It's not the be-all and end-all of local government election success but it's the closest thing to it.

You won't get far if your name on a ballot doesn't spark the slightest positive recognition in a voter's brain.

At the beginning of his campaign to be elected mayor of Tauranga, building name recognition was the biggest mountain Tenby Powell had to climb.

He wasn't a complete unknown, of course.

He was well-known in business circles, had appeared with high-flying business leader wife Sharon Hunter on the rich list, rented his $20m Auckland home to celebrities, and he grew up and went to school in Ōtumoetai.

But had any of that filtered down to the average voter in Tauranga? Doubtful.

In the five years before he announced his mayoral run in May, his name appeared in the Bay of Plenty Times nine times, mostly in the business pages.

In the same period, his main competition - incumbent mayor, former councillor and philanthropist Greg Brownless - appeared more than 600 times.

A search of Powell's name in Google Trends - a tool that tracks the popularity of search terms - for the same period is basically a flat line before May, for Bay of Plenty results.

A very different picture to Brownless' regular bumps.

So to come from that to winning the mayoralty with, at the time of writing, a 4000-vote margin, is an extraordinary feat.

I will be surprised if he's not the top-spending mayoral candidate with a bill close to the $55,000 limit, but no one can say Powell bought this win.

He had a strategy, he had a campaign team - who also deserve credit - and he put in the legwork.

He says he had about 500 meetings over five months, and he was having them before he moved back to Tauranga to campaign fulltime as well.

Not only was he at the candidate events run by community organisations - of which, to Tauranga's credit, there were numerous this year - he also held his own community meetings.

Some were well attended, others less so. But he was there, shaking hands and making connections.

He was in traditional media - papers, billboards, hoardings - and he was all over Facebook. Posting, running sponsored ads.

His campaign page, started on July 11 this year, has more than 2000 likes. Brownless' three-year-old mayoral page has just under 500.

So he got the name recognition, and he got the people behind him and they delivered him to the office with a decent mandate to get things done.

The time for talk is over. It's time for Powell to prove himself.