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Business SMART: |
SMART Co-op Marketing
Teams - A Review |
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By:
Dennis A. Conforto
Chairman & CEO of A-Z Media Group, Inc. |
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Of all the things
the SMART Group has done, this has to be one of the most
exciting! It involves the very core belief the SMART Group which
is co-opetition.
There is no question about the fact that the industry as a whole
has gotten the vision of what it takes to compete one with
another. But after a 10 year run, the industry is now starting
to learn the power behind cooperating with each other.
Last week in Toronto, Canada we saw the spirit of cooperation
take place as nearly 100 people gathered together to take part
in the first roll out of the Regional SMART Co-op Marketing
Teams.
For nearly eight hours retailers, manufacturers, distributors
and service providers listened as we walked them through an
overview of the industry and what it takes for retailers to work
together just like car dealers do.
Manufacturers and distributors learned how co-op funds are part
of the fuel behind getting newspapers across North America to
create a weekly scrapbooking section within the newspapers.
This meeting in Canada was the first on the road tour of some 20
meetings that The SMART Group will conduct across North America.
There were 15 companies that became new members to the SMART
Group with another 5 agreeing to join in the next few weeks. If
we do this at all 20 meetings, we will add 400 new members to
The SMART Group. But more importantly we will create
relationships with the press, and that is the key to the success
for the scrapbooking community.
Why newspapers? Well, only in the newspapers can we have enough
content with enough frequency to spread the word of why people
scrapbook. It is why we scrapbook that is the true brand of the
industry, not how. And the newspapers across North America are
hungry for human interest stories and frankly nothing has more
human interest than scrapbookers who speak from the heart about
why they scrapbook.
Scrapbooking.com Magazine created a section called “A Matter of
the Heart” in which our readers share with us why they
scrapbook. The stories are powerful and should be in the local
newspapers of the communities those consumers live within. And
that is just what Scrapbooking.com Magazine is going to do, feed
stories to all the local media outlets we can.
From working with the newspapers and looking at other industries
that have created sections, we now know the power of creating a
section. When you create a section within the newspaper that has
stories and advertisers within the same category that readership
goes up 200%. And that is the point: the scrapbooking industry
needs more exposure to the mass market so we can grow the base
of scrapbookers within the industry.
To do that we need to work together so that the entire industry
grows and each of the companies in the industry then grow. Think
about what it will be like to have a scrapbooking section every
week in every newspaper in North America. Consider the amount of
exposure and the growth to the industry as retailers advertise
in those sections and new consumers enter your store.
The future of scrapbooking has never been brighter, but it will
take people working together. There can be no walls and no forms
of protection that attempt to grow only the few. Free enterprise
has always proven that those who build a protective wall around
themselves limit not only their growth but the growth of the
industry as a whole. Only through market by market cooperation
can we see scrapbooking grow to the $15 billion industry it
ought to be. When that occurs we all win, and we all should win.
And that is what being business SMART is all about. |
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