January 7, 2026
Rethinking How Associations Align With Market Realities
Guest author: Geoff Marlow
Admitting the Wrong Market: Why Lighting Association Standards No Longer Match Industry Reality
When you join a professional association, that membership becomes a signal. A logo on your website. A line in your proposal. It tells the industry something about who you are and how you operate. For manufacturers, distributors, and specifiers in lighting, those signals matter enormously. They communicate trust, professional competence, and alignment with shared industry values. But here’s what most people don’t realize: those trust signals are only as strong as the gate that lets people in.
The Real Problem Isn’t Misconduct. It’s Obsolescence.
Over the past two decades, the lighting industry has transformed in ways that would have been impossible to predict when most association bylaws were written. Geography no longer constrains business operations. A company can manage pricing, product flow, and influence across multiple regions from a single office. Companies now operate across multiple points of the value chain, blurring the old lines between representation, distribution, and manufacturing.
Over the past several years, institutional capital has reshaped the sector’s operating model. Alongside scale and financial discipline came added complexity, shortened decision horizons, and, in many cases, an incomplete understanding of the markets being entered. This creates a sector that appears organized but often struggles to balance long-term stewardship with short-term returns. But the membership standards that underpin major associations like NEMRA and NAED were built for a different world. A world where representation was separate from manufacturing. Where territorial responsibility aligned cleanly with accountability. Where you could reasonably infer independence just by looking at the ownership structure, that world no longer exists.
Why Entry Standards Evaluate Who You Are, Not How You Operate
Most trade associations still evaluate membership through the same familiar criteria they’ve used for years. You complete an application that documents your business type. You demonstrate minimum tenure in the industry. You agree to a code of ethics. You submit your application. It’s administratively clean and efficient. It’s also incomplete.
Today’s lighting companies operate across multiple territories simultaneously. They influence pricing beyond traditional contractual boundaries. They combine representation with manufacturing or private-label activity. They optimize decisions around platform scale rather than localized market stewardship. Under most existing membership frameworks, an organization doing all of these things can qualify cleanly because the standards focus on structure and category, not on behavior or incentive alignment. This isn’t about intent or dishonesty.
It’s about whether definitions have actually kept pace with how people operate.
When Standards Meet Reality, the Gap Widens
Let me describe a scenario that’s increasingly common in lighting. A sophisticated organization participates in the industry on a significant scale. Product moves across multiple markets where responsibility for demand creation is unclear and diffused. Pricing visibility extends well beyond the boundaries where it was originally intended. Representation coexists with manufacturing or private-label activity.
Capital allocation prioritizes efficiency and growth over localized market stewardship. Under many association entry standards, none of this is explicitly disqualifying. Yet collectively, these characteristics pull away from the very principles that association membership is meant to signal. Where does accountability actually reside? Who owns market development versus fulfillment? How are confidential pricing structures protected when the same firm operates in multiple roles? How are conflicts managed when incentives overlap?
These aren’t abstract governance questions. Manufacturers, distributors, specifiers, and smaller firms navigate these realities every single day. The gap creates friction. It creates uncertainty. And it erodes the trust that associations were originally designed to protect.
The Real Cost of Weak Entry Standards
When associations fail to clearly address functional independence, territorial responsibility, pricing stewardship, and conflict transparency, they unintentionally endorse business models they were never designed to support. This happens quietly. Exceptions get normalized. Standards remain static while the market keeps moving.
By the time concerns surface, the governance gap has already been created. This is how trust erodes in mature industries. Not through scandal. Not through outright malfeasance. But through gradual drift. And associations end up arbitrating gray areas that they never clearly defined in the first place.
Why Being Stricter Isn’t the Real Solution
It’s tempting to think the answer is simply stronger enforcement. If associations cracked down harder, maintained better vigilance, and penalized bad actors, everything would align. But you can’t enforce your way out of a definition problem. When entry standards allow fundamentally different operating models under the same membership umbrella, oversight becomes subjective and inconsistent. Associations spend their enforcement energy arbitrating situations that should have been clarified before admission. Members are left guessing at acceptable behavior based on precedent rather than principle.
Effective governance works best when expectations are clear before someone joins, not negotiated after.
What the Right Approach Actually Looks Like
The International Association of Lighting Designers offers an interesting contrast. Not because it governs the same stakeholders, but because of how it approaches membership. IALD’s framework is built on the premise that professional credibility must be demonstrated, not assumed. Tiered membership levels, defined experience thresholds, portfolio submissions, and peer review ensure that entry reflects actual practice. Importantly, their standards have evolved alongside the profession itself.
This underscores a principle that matters for any industry association: entry is not just an administrative step. It’s a market signal. As the lighting ecosystem becomes more interconnected, professional credibility is increasingly shaped not just by who designs or manages products, but by how those designs are supported, fulfilled, and stewarded in the market. As associations evolve, they might consider how clearly articulated expectations around collaboration and market behavior can strengthen the integrity of the profession without overreaching into enforcement or commercial restriction.
This isn’t about control. It’s about coherence. When designers align with partners whose market behaviors reflect transparency, accountability, ethical pricing stewardship, and respect for the design process, the whole industry wins.
What’s at Stake When Entry Standards Drift
As complexity in the market increases, reliance on association signals increases right alongside it. Manufacturers use those signals when selecting partners. Distributors interpret them as indicators of fairness and consistency. Specifiers depend on them as proof of accountability. Smaller firms trust them as stable rules for competing in good faith.
When entry standards fall behind operational reality, the industry compensates in predictable ways. Firms protect themselves. Agreements become more prescriptive. Discretion narrows. What was once governed by shared standards increasingly becomes governed by risk transfer. Governance shifts away from collective accountability and toward individual self-protection, and associations lose their coordinating role precisely as complexity increases. Strong entry standards do not constrain growth—they enable sustainable scale by aligning incentives, reducing friction, and preserving the trust that allows markets to function efficiently.
The Leadership Question Ahead
This isn’t a critique of any single organization. It’s a question that every association should be asking itself: Do our membership qualifications still reflect how the market actually operates? What behaviors are we implicitly endorsing at the point of entry? How often should those definitions be reviewed and updated? The most durable institutions aren’t those that defend legacy definitions. They’re the ones willing to refine them as reality changes.
The Bottom Line
Governance begins when membership standards align with market expectations, not when enforcement is triggered. Lighting associations remain essential to the industry’s future. Their credibility will depend not on reacting to change, but on anticipating it at the point of entry.
Geoffrey Marlow
Geoff Marlow brings over 30 years of unparalleled experience and achievement to the industry, solidifying his reputation as a principled leader and innovative strategist. He has held senior-most executive roles across mid-sized specialty manufacturers, multi-billion-dollar manufacturing enterprises, and as an entrepreneurial start-up manufacturer's representative within a top 10 construction market. Most notably, Geoff led his start-up representative agency to unprecedented success, growing it into the largest agency in its market within just five years.
