For Bath Safety Products

• Promotion to consumers of bath safety devices is a critical strategy for growing this business line. Target baby boomers with elderly parents in a focused advertising campaign.
• Recall means the number of times a person needs to hear or see an advertisement to remember it — generally somewhere between six and 12 times. Make sure your ad campaigns run consistently so you get customer recall. And make sure your ad agency measures recall in your target audience.
• Most people who need bath safety de-vices don’t even know what they are or what the options are for them. Make sure that any promotional materials are geared to the problem at hand. For instance, do you know someone who could slip in the tub/shower? Too many ads feature large pictures of products but do not tell people how to solve a particular issue. Focus your advertising and in-store pitches on problem-solving.
• Invest money to make money. When designing a bath safety advertising campaign, don’t just write about what is important to you. Get a group of elderly people and/or baby boomers together to give you their opinions.

Use this mini-focus group to give you feedback on your advertising campaign. Pay them a small stipend. Listen to their comments and problems. Write about what they want to hear. Small investments in market research can have big returns.

• Most physicians don’t know how to identify people who need bath safety devices, but they might be willing to hand out a consumer brochure to their elderly patients. Consider a well thought-out one-pager that talks about problems in the bathroom and how to prevent them. Don’t call it “bath safety” — that is our industry’s term. Use language that is identified by your focus group, and make it meaningful.
• There is a huge, growing market of elderly now living in a variety of different adult centers. Target these centers as well as traditional assisted-living or care facilities in your promotional campaign.
• If you want to position bath safety devices well, set up an attractive “bathroom” in your store to show how the equipment is used. When people come into a store and can see how equipment can help, they want to purchase it. Such a display will save your salespeople time in explaining the products as well.

Alison Cherney is president of Cherney & Associates Inc., a Brentwood, Tenn.-based marketing and sales consulting firm, and is the producer of Homecare Power Selling, a sales training program for home care sales reps. She can be reached at 615/776-3399 or www.cherneyandassociates.com.