Marketing from Home: How some quarantined professionals are creatively connecting with customers
Above: Finn O'Brien of Nordeon Group USA injects deadpan humor into a company update.
During quarantine, connecting with lighting decision makers is becoming more challenging for both manufacturers and agents. For specifiers, Zoom meetings, webinars, CEU credit presentations and virtual sales calls can fill up their days if they allow it. Lighting sales professionals who are used to bringing their dynamic personalities and product knowledge into a dozen or more meetings each week are now shackled to their home offices, forced to improvise other ways to stay connected with their customers while keeping their pets and home-schooled children at hushed tones.
Designers are used to collaborating in the studio culture. Salespeople are used to servicing and selling -- one person to one person. Now, in many instances, salespeople are suddenly becoming improvised marketers: crafting messages from one person to many people.
During the pandemic, we’ve adjusted our expectations for how we experience various things. It now seems completely normal to see news anchors and late night comedians broadcasting from spare bedrooms and basements – often without their perfectly quaffed hair and flattering makeup.
Many of our lighting industry peers are doing their best to inject realness and humor into the mission to stay connected with our lighting colleagues.
Here are some of our favorite examples of lighting people marketing from home amidst a the quarantine:
Illuminate, the Hubbell and Lutron agency in Boston, connects with dozens of customers each Friday afternoon through Bingo games. Yes, Bingo.
A few Fridays ago, we tuned into Illuminate's Instagram Live event to see how many people would actually join the Bingo contest, and were floored to see 94 people attending the virtual event. Each week, Principals Rick Taylor and Steve Prudhomme facilitate an entertaining hour of bingo balls, camaraderie and cocktails.
Winners of the various rounds of bingo receive quarantine- essential prizes like Uber Eats gift cards, Amazon Echo and a Tushy Classic Bidet. (Installation not included.)
At other times, the agency also pairs a lighting and controls duo on Instagram Live to lead a fun and informative lighting-related discussion called "Libations and Lamps." Naturally, it's BYOB.
This video of Acuity Brands' Dave Riney is informative, brilliant and hilarious. Watch him demonstrate the JUNO AI Alexa downlight.
Acuity Brands added the video to its social media feed. Under non-quarantine times, would a "record from home" marketing video even have been a consderation for the always-polished, high-production-value Marketing team of the $3B+ company?
Yes, it's over 5 minutes long, but it doesn't disappoint. Our favorite part is the JBL speaker demo at 4:25.
Finn O'Brien and John Geagan of Nordeon USA interview Lee Brandt, Principal at HLB New York, from their home offices:
Finn described that the goals of the Nordeon Group USA video series "Coffee Talk" are to project a "casual, funny, and authentic view of real people working through real challenges happening right now in the lighting industry."
Justin Brown, Principal of Boston lighting design firm, Lam Partners, entertained us with these work-from-home shenanigans.
We may all be working virtually these days, but that's no reason not to have a little fun in your new office digs. Here's your weekly Work From Home #wfh tip from @lampartners Principal Justin Brown. #lightingbylam #workingfromhome pic.twitter.com/eNVM5cIXeN
— Lam Partners (@lampartners) April 2, 2020
On Friday, May 8, Justin will be part of a panel participating in the IALD's webinar entiled "Work-Life Balance – Parenting in Lighting." We're looking forward to it, Justin! We also appreciated meeting Justin's cat in other Lam Partners social media posts. Well done.
San Diego Lighting Associates made this compelling infographic correlating the 6-foot social distance rule to luminaire sizes:
Now we know to stand 8.7 bollards apart from one another! Even though the drawing is missing the unneccesary "not to scale" disclaimer, we thought it was an incredibly clever and fun way to send a message to customers without being salesy or boring. The Acuity Brands mothership liked it so much, they worked the infographic into their social media, too.
Brian Rhea, SDLA Principal, explained that the agency "has utilized social media, SDLA Academy (our training and education platform), and various other marketing platforms to be an extension of our connectivity with our customers in San Diego for years and are relying heavily on this platform right now. The lighting industry and its extended design community are tight knit in our market and we are striving to maintain, and even enhance, those relationships as we all experience a new way of interacting and doing business together."
"One way we have done this by pivoting our SDLA Academy Training and Education platform to 100% web-based, but also LIVE and in person, offering 2 classes per week to the local lighting and design community who may be interested in attending. Since we began offering these classes about 6 weeks ago, we have averaged anywhere from 50-80 attendees PER CLASS, with attendance almost 100% consisting of the specification community in San Diego! Feedback we have received has been extremely positive; we have not only been told it’s a great way to learn about lighting technologies and new products, but also a great opportunity to break up the day and for participants to do something new and fun for their personal and professional growth."
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