A LEADING retail guru has backed Torbay's bid for town centre management as a vital tool in the fightback against economic downturn.

Dennis Reid, (pictured) who has worked with many of the world's leading companies including Nokia, Kodak, Gucci, M&S and Boots as well as thousands of independent retailers, yesterday led the first of a series of special workshops attended by around 140 Torbay retailers.

The former international sportsman and Olympic coach said the way for retailers, the hospitality trade and the resort to weather the economic crisis was to make sure they were attracting new customers and retaining existing customers, both individually and as an area.

Speaking to the Herald Express, Mr Reid backed the BID process to set up a Torbay Town Centre company, with a chief executive, to co-ordinate improvements to the town centres, starting with Torquay.

This has to have the majority support of traders in the town. The project is paid for by trade with about one per cent added on to business rates.

Mr Reid said someone was needed to spearhead the improvements to the retailing industry in the area.

"The process has got to be supported by the industry 100 per cent," he said. "You can't have half the businesses supporting it and the other half not. If you choose to get behind it, it will work though there will naturally be mistakes along the way.

"But you can't sit back and moan that it is all everyone else's fault if your business is not succeeding.

"Let's get away from a blame culture, let's get together and focus on making improvements, next week, next month, next year."

Torbay mayor Nick Bye has already stated that getting the branding right for Torbay, and not just for the tourism industry, is a high priority.

And Mr Reid backed the process of creating a good brand for an area, but also making sure that the reality lived up to visitors' and shoppers' expectations.

It is a process that could take three to eight years but, at the end of it, he believed the balance of shops in the area would move away from more cheap 'pound shops' to more top of the market retailers.

A key, he said, was the development of a vision, such as the Mayoral Vision, to create a tourism and shopping environment that was attractive to the kind of visitors who spend money, and then for the council to talk to the kind of retailers they want to attract to the Bay, in the same way that they have already talked to developers involved in hotel and leisure developments.

Mr Reid believed that existing businesses had to sign up to any branding created for an area and respond to it.

He said it was also important to get the facilities in a town right, such as access and good car parking.

But he did not believe the introduction of parking meters could be blamed if a business was not succeeding.