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Who is your competition? That is a pretty important question for a marketer. When talking about differentiation or establishing a brand position, it is usually in respect to the competition. When we evaluate pricing, it is usually in respect to the competition. So who is your competition? The community down the street? The one across town? A recent blog post by Marketing Sage Seth Godin on competition provides some thoughts on this question that are particularly relevant to senior living. Give it a read and I think you’ll see why.

In the course of a day, I probably use the term “senior living” a hundred times. I am sure many of us do. In a recent discussion about a community’s brand position, someone said senior living as casually as I do those hundred times a day. However, this time, when I heard it in the context of the conversation, I didn’t hear senior living, I heard senior
LIVING.

Not really a light bulb moment, as the trend toward wellness and successful aging has been moving our field in this direction for more than ten years. But it got me thinking again about the power of words and their ability to communicate. When I heard LIVING, I heard enrichment, engagement, freedom, independence, connection, comfort and security. I heard all these ideas in that single word, because I know what this particular community and organization does for residents. I have experienced the culture when visiting the community. I have been told, firsthand, about what living at this community means to someone.    

The term senior living caught on many years ago to replace senior housing, a term that best describes the business rather than the benefit. Yet how many senior living providers changed the word, but not the experience. Can you convey living as LIVING? If you think you can, do your communications materials project that? Does a visitor to your community experience it? Are residents telling others about it? Is your marketing focused on bringing this to life for those who don’t know your community?

At your next staff meeting, write Senior LIVING on the board and ask, “If we made that claim, could we stand behind it?” If you can, you have something special.

I’ve shared in this space several times that I rarely visit a community without coming away with some new learning or insight. But sometimes, it’s re-learning a fundamental truth in senior living marketing. That was the case when I was recently touring a community with one of the sales counselors. At one point in the conversation, she said, “And you have to remember these folks are all planners; they’re into the details.”

And there it was, my lesson. I have heard that mantra since I began working in senior living marketing and know it to be true. But hearing it made me think: How am I using that in my recommendations and work with our clients? Are we crafting messages for the planner, and do we position community benefits to meet their particular mindset?

Planners want the facts, they need all the answers, they expect you to have thought through the details and have all the loose ends tied up. If they can think of the question, they expect you should have, too. These are folks who talk value, not price. They’re the ones who want to know about options and expect flexibility. Planners pride themselves on making smart, informed decisions, whether they’re 70, 80 or 90 years old. 

Even today, when we see independent living prospects who are older and perhaps a little more need-driven, they still don’t have to make the move. It is up to us to give them good reasons. Incentives, discounts and deferrals may help close the deal, but they aren’t going to win the argument. There is still a need for persuasion, for counseling, for challenging their misperceptions and for moving individuals forward in the process. And while it’s always about the individual and their particular situation, don’t forget that more often than not, you’re talking with a planner. Don’t cut corners, lay it all out, give them the facts and then respect their decision.

Lesson learned, again.

I had lunch the other day with a long-time friend who is also a marketing professional. We are working in two very different worlds right now ─ I’m in senior living and she’s in kids marketing ─ but we always seem to find some common ground when talking shop. During our last lunch, we discussed what elements were needed to create breakthrough marketing ideas.

Innovation doesn’t happen because it is an agenda item at a monthly marketing meeting. Coming up with big ideas on demand is like catching lightning in a bottle, and we all know how often that happens. So what is required to foster innovation? Here are three important organizational/cultural qualities that I think, based on my experience, are almost always present in innovative marketing teams.

Individual Leadership – Innovation and breakthrough thinking happen when there is a recognizable and passionate leader who owns the vision and dream of the organization. Someone who embodies the very essence of what the organization is striving to attain and communicate. This doesn’t mean there must be a single all-powerful marketing person, or even that this leader must be the head of marketing. Rather, what this leadership offers is a guiding force, a source of inspiration, and an effective sounding board to initiate and feed the process.

Risk-Taking – Breakthroughs don’t typically happen on the first try. The big idea is often the third, fourth or fifth thing tried. Test and learn, try new things, understand it is a process. Organizations that value innovation also recognize that sometimes good ideas on paper don’t work in the real world. It is hard to be a conservative innovator. That doesn’t mean being foolish or not strategic, but it does require a tolerance for bumps in the road on the way to the breakthrough idea.

Investment – Hand in hand with risk-taking is knowledge that it might cost a little more to find that breakthrough idea. Whether this is partnering with premier resources, the costs of trial and error, or the need to continuously fund the effort over time, marketing innovation must be an organization value, and thus seen as an investment ─ not an expense.

Is the presence of these three qualities a guarantee of innovation – no. But consider your own situation.  Are you being asked to achieve, or are you striving for innovation without these? How successful have you been? New thinking is hard. Big ideas are more uncommon than common. But it isn’t all luck. Pay attention to the make-up of your organization to give yourself the best chance at breakthrough thinking.

A few other posts on this and similar subjects may be of interest to you.

Getting Noticed or Getting Connected? by Bill Sitton

Don’t Fix What’s Not Broken by Ken Curnes

Recently I was consulting with a client on repositioning their community. It is a common situation. The community began decades ago as a nursing home, which at the time brought a needed and innovative service offering to their area. Fast forward five decades and the community is still known as a nursing home, despite having strong independent and assisted living options available, not to mention a culture focused more on wellness than on the care model indicative of 1950s nursing homes.

The topic of how to reposition a community could be a subject for a series of posts. But I will limit this post to a single thought: Repositioning a community is not accomplished through developing new advertising/communications – at least not entirely. To reposition a community in the minds of your consumer audience, that is, to get them to think differently about who you are and what you do, your audience must:

1)      Know your complete offering

2)      Understand the value

3)      Believe it

Think about this list for a moment. Advertising/communications can accomplish some of this, but not all of this. This is why repositioning a community requires the involvement of the entire community team. Here’s a simple graphic that makes this point.

Achieving each successive goal takes increased personal contact. Knowledge can be gained from brochures or ads or even news stories, but understanding and ultimately belief come through interaction with community staff. It comes from building relationships and trust, and it comes from experiencing the reality of the messages first delivered through communications. 

As I referenced in the opening, repositioning is a much broader subject and this one point is in itself over-simplified. But it is an important concept, whether your community is repositioning or not. Effective marketing is a team effort that involves more than just communications or even sales. There must be continuity for the consumer at each step, moving them forward from knowledge to understanding to belief.