Archive for the ‘Brand Visibility’ Category
Association Lessons from E-tail
14 May 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
We do a publication for the Healthcare Financial Management Association. Its aim is to demonstrate that reforming healthcare isn’t a big mystery. There are many smart people in the industry with excellent ideas who see the problems and know what to do about them, but they aren’t talking to each other. Insurance companies, doctors, nurses, administrators, politicians, patients all can contribute to making healthcare more affordable, more responsive and more universal.
Reforming/reinventing associations should, if anything, be simpler but seems a mystery to many. Or possibly the way forward is clear but the path is too painful to start down and so associations are stuck in place.
Healthcare has learned a lot from retail. Think about it: You walk into the Gap, someone greets you, there’s music playing, the lighting is easy on your eyes, it smells good, you can easily find what you want. A few years ago, you’d walk into a hospital or a doctor’s office and it smelled like disinfectant, the lighting was harsh, the chairs were uncomfortable and the magazines were ancient. If you weren’t feeling well, you instantly began to feel worse. Little doc-in-a-box clinics appeared, places where you didn’t need an appointment, the wait was short, the plants were live and the receptionist smiled at you.
A few months ago, I did a post called Retail Therapy for Associations and I’ve kept thinking about what retail, or more specifically e-tail, can teach associations.
Then I came across AVA Living and I asked myself, how is it different from an association? It’s a beautiful site for interior designers and consumers whose aim is to connect the two and dramatically increase the market for design services by “10,000 times,” says Founder David Bassett-Parkins. You have to join (free) and, if you’re a designer, you have to qualify for membership. Designers can see each other’s work and communicate directly with each other, sharing best practices and asking for advice. There is community, content, knowledge sharing all with the ultimate goal of helping interior designers do their jobs better and get more customers.
How is this different from the two largest interior design associations, the American Society of Interior Design and the International Interior Design Association ? I’m not saying that either of them is doing a bad job. IIDA is one of my clients and I think they’re fantastic. Both of these organizations have traditional association business models, however, and, as we all know, that model was already under threat and the recession is making matters a whole lot worse.
AVA Living has none of that legacy to undo so has been free to invent a new business model.
Only 25% of interior designers have a website, according to Bassett-Parkins. Most are small firms that rely on referrals to get business. There’s an automatic limit to their growth because they’re local. Firms in small towns will remain small regardless of the design talent, for instance. Designers believe that if they could only educate consumers about the benefits of good design, they could convert them to customers. Consumers, however, are more interested in buying products than paying to be educated. Designers charge by the hour so find it difficult to give prospective customers a firm price. Finding a designer who can and will answer the one question you have is difficult.
AVA Living has concentrated on building a community of designers in its first 18 months, now “in the thousands.” Instead of needing their own sites, a designer can set up a profile that will be seen my consumers all over the world. The basis of the interaction is called Designer Room Review. A consumer submits photos of a room and selects a designer to critique it. The designer rates the room on 5 criteria and writes a review.
“This gives them something to talk about,” Bassett-Parkins says. “The consumer may only want conceptual design services and not even get into furniture. They want only what they want. Consumers are afraid that the designer will do something they don’t like and they’ll have to plop down a whole lot of money. This service is standardized.”
Now the business model: Right now the site carries luxury advertising but that is “but one of the revenue streams that will be developing,” Bassett-Parkins says. Suppliers will be brought into the fold and designers will be able to specify products to be delivered directly to the consumer: paint in a specific shade, a sofa with exactly this upholstery. Eventually, AVA Living will sell its own products and there will be the usual retail mark up.
The limits on the designer’s business just disappeared. The ongoing customer conversation is happening, the designer is selling expertise but the consumer is buying a product they understand. The location of the two parties is immaterial. “The market here is huge,” Bassett-Parkins says, “but it’s going to explode in China. That is not business most American designers would ever be able to go after.”
There are obvious reasons why a non-profit can’t go as far as AVA Living has gone. But associations have supplier members that are interested in the core membership for purely commercial reasons. Professional associations of all sorts try to help consumers find reputable, qualified practitioners. If associations thought of themselves more as a marketplace of goods and services and less of an idea bazaar, their value propositions would become a lot more compelling. And they would open themselves up to new ideas about business models that are sustainable in a new reinvented future.
Headed for the Door
12 May 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
Duke Energy has left the National Association of Manufacturers. Duke began to evaluate memberships at the end of 2008 as part of cost-cutting measures. Duke also disagrees with NAM’s opposition to the Obama administration’s cap-and-trade policies. Not a manufacturer itself, the Charlotte-based energy company felt that it would have no effect on changing NAM’s mind.
NAM had seemed in lock step with Bush administration policies, pleasing many of its members on issues like energy and climate change but angering them on others like Chinese currency manipulation. With the new administration, NAM and its members may find themselves on the wrong side of many policy initiatives.
American manufacturing is a fraction of its former size but is undergoing a more or less successful reinvention. Leaner, greener and, according to some unions, meaner, the sector employs more than 12 million people in the United States even in the teeth of the global recession.
A founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, Duke and companies like it can vote at more places than the ballot box. Association lobbying, especially in a sector as powerful as manufacturing, has a lot more pull than one man-one vote. In this case, NAM has lost more than membership dues. A little bit of its clout just fell off.
Who Owns Your Brand?
16 Apr 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
Remember Tom Peters’ book The Brand You 50? It was all about how you yourself are a brand worth marketing, worth protecting and how to make your brand more desirable to employers and bosses.
Chances are you’ve been to branding school at your association, something along the lines of how to and how not to use the logo, what PMS color is acceptable, what the tagline is, how to sign emails. Chances also are that, if you’ve been on either of the two big social networks for business–Facebook or LinkedIn–you’ve seen pages built by some group that’s picked up your logo and some of your content and is sharing it with their fans. Most of the time, this is benign and actually helps you spread your brand without doing anything. They’re doing the work that you don’t have to and as long as you’re part of the conversation, it’s all good.
User communities, in fact, have the ability to create their own brands, according to a working paper from two professors. Apache open source software, for instance, was created by the Apache Software Foundation rather than by the company.
How do you feel about that? This is the step beyond them finding your content so interesting that they want to share it. This is them creating a loyal following, a group that recognizes a brand when they see one. Brands have their own attributes. You might be dependable and solid while the user-created brand is cutting edge and responsive.
Is Your Brand a Religion?
24 Feb 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
Gord Hotchkiss, writing in a recent issue of SearchInsider, about brand says, “One of the most ironic things about humans is that we seek to define who we are as individuals by the social associations we make. We stand out by joining groups. And this is a huge motivating factor in the brands we choose to give religious devotion to.”
Think about it. You’re a Mac user, a Prius driver, a Diet Coke drinker. You are also a member of an association, maybe more than one. But, thinking as a member, is that brand strong enough to define you? Granted, it’s not a label like a wardrobe from J. Crew or an iPhone in your pocket. If it is not, however, something that feels like part of who you are, eventually, it will go away. You won’t remain a member because it is not part of defining you.
When I interviewed Gary Boyler, executive director of the International Coach Federation, for my book, The Competition Within; How Members Will Reinvent Associations, he said, “Branding has just come to associations. A brand is a promise of, in this case, consistent quality. It’s got to be something that you can deliver consistently wherever you are.”
Hotchkiss’ point is that some brands are promises—plenty enough to try to live up to—and some are religions. I will refuse a Diet Pepsi if there’s nothing else to drink; not just a matter of taste but of the fact that I lived in Atlanta for a long time, grew up asking for a Co-cola and feel that people like me should make a stand on such vital choices. That’s a religion (and, admittedly, a little weird).
Is your association a religion for any of your members? Would they refuse an offer from a competing association? If you’re a chocolate company and the choice is a chocolate association or a confectionary association or a food manufacturing association or the candy retail association, and you can only afford the time and the money to join one or two, which will it be? Each of them has a brand and, if you’re that chocolate company, their names instantly conjure up a brand impression of who they are, what they do, who else belongs and why. The one you choose has to live up to its brand promise of helping you be the best chocolate company in the world.
That association understands the short list of things that are absolutely critical to you. You don’t come to the conference sessions on marketing; you do come to all the ones on food safety. You don’t play golf; you do have a wine cellar. You don’t read books; you do subscribe to the McKinsey Report. You don’t belong to Facebook; you do send email at 1 am.
In other words, an association brand that fulfills its promise—and maybe aspires to religious conversion—is not just consistent. It takes all the data it can get and analyses the demographics, psychographics, technographics and translates them into products, services, programs that apply perfectly to who you are. And then it stays on top of them as they change.
Any group is only as good as the individuals who belong to it. The brand attracts who joins but the people who join create the brand.
Ask yourself honestly:
· Do you have a brand that is strong enough to attract and retain members?
· Is your brand a promise or a religion?
· If it’s a promise, are you doing everything you can to fulfill that promise?
· If it’s a religion, can you tell the rest of us how you did it?
