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ONLINE ONLY ARTICLE
The
Big Six
By Howard Shingle
All About Blinds & Shutters does some typical advertising—mainly
newspaper ads. But Roger Gober has just about had it with one popular
advertising venue.
“The phone book is a major pet peeve of mine,” he says. “Every
year you pick up the phone book and in anybody’s marketplace
you go to the blind category or you go to the shutter category
and any major player in any major market will tell you at least
30 percent of those guys are out of business the following year—or
they’ve changed their names, or within three months of the
book coming out their phone numbers are out of order. The phone
book has taken a huge financial hit because they’re not collecting
for those ads. So where is that cost being taken out the next year?
In my rates.”
Instead, Gober has turned to two more inventive and effective means
of marketing. One is a comprehensive, 16-page brochure.
“What we did is take every odd application that we ran into
in our market area—because every market is different—and
we photographed it and we did cutaways of all of the products that
go in there and some of the specifications on them,” Gober
explains. “So, typically, when our salesman goes out to the
job site he can use that one brochure to discuss numerous options
on one particular window with the customer.
“That’s nice to have because I can’t take my
brochure into the New York market and do that. It’s pretty
much exclusive to my market area,” he adds.
Another approach has been to join an advertising syndicate. “I
was approached by another company in town that’s not in the
window treatment business, and they said they started an advertising
consortium called The Big Six and it’s just home improvement
companies. They are all locally owned companies, and the smallest
guy in that group is about a $5 million a year company, the biggest
guy is a $200 million a year company. All of the companies’ names
are household names in their industries in our local area.
“We grouped together and we started doing commercials. We’d
throw a couple thousand bucks each into the pot every month. What
we like about the commercials is the affiliation of ourselves with
the other companies. It has worked out real well,” Gober
says.
The Big Six includes an alarm company, a pest control company,
a heating and air condition company, an electrical company, a plumber
and All About Blinds & Shutters. The group has ads running
on the backs of city busses, but has concentrated on radio spots
and is looking to doing television.
The ads feature all of the companies in the consortium with one
phone number. When customers dial the number they hear a menu of
options that will route their calls directly to the company or
service they are interested in.
“One of the wonderful things we’ve gotten out of it
is that it’s like a big roundtable to discuss credit issues,
workman’s
comp issues, things like that.
“Are we getting our $2,000 worth back in direct phone calls?
Probably not. Are we getting our name out there? We’re buying
10 seconds of a 60-second spot, but we’re getting that spot
with $12,000 worth of purchasing power as opposed to $2,000 worth
of purchasing
power. So you hear these commercials over and over and over again.
So our name is out there on a very consistent basis.”
Add that to customers seeing the company’s name on its fleet
of 12 vehicles (white, four-door SUVs) all over town and customers
are much more comfortable with All About Blinds & Shutters,
Gober says. |
