Larry Lauck - National Marketing Partnerships

Larry Lauck: When we launched that national campaign, one thing that I noticed right off the start, we don't have the muscle to really push other larger industries aside and garner a lot of the media coverage. So we had to develop partnerships. I'm a big believer in developing strategic alliances, partnerships, and one of those is go after the largest publisher in the United States. Meredith Publishing - now dotdash Meredith - and say how can we develop a relationship? And over the years we did that as well as the 17th year we launched a national consumer magazine focusing just on ALA members lighting that's on a newsstand in every showroom and that put us on the map. And then from that we're able to develop a national google campaign in Canada and the US to drive traffic into our website to find their local showroom. When we did consumer research several years ago, many of the consumers could not even find their local showroom. So they had to rely on other resources. Well we want to make it easy when we redid our website for them to go into the locator service, to find a showroom, find helpful videos and really make that shopping experience very pleasing. So when they go into that showroom, they have questions. Most consumers now when they walk into - whether buying a car, buying a lamp, they're gonna have several questions and they're well versed right before they come into that store. So you have to be extremely knowledgeable, understand the issues or the questions that they're going to have - could be about a smart home. I want to have a smart home. What does that mean? So you have to know how to take that and transition that into a sale and close the sale and have a satisfied customer.