By Powell Slaughter
Originally featured in Home Furnishings Business Magazine – April 2010

Relationship marketing, which extends retailer-customer communication beyond advertising in recognition of the benefits of customer satisfaction for the long term, is new ground for many furniture retailers.

“A lot of what people are doing with relationship marketing depends on their customer base and value proposition,” said Jason Pires, principal and creative director of MVC Agency, a Los Angeles-area marketing agency specializing in brand development, design and advertising for the home furnishings, cosmetics and fashion industries. “If they’re selling on price alone, most of the relationship building is quite simplistic. There might be loyalty being established, but basically they’re selling on price. For retailers emphasizing quality, style and sophistication, it’s a lot more effective for them to use relationship-building techniques.”

It all boils down to what Pires calls a soft-sell and a retailer’s effort to associate the brand with certain images and values.

He cited some examples of services associated with this “holistic” approach. Southern California retailer Pampa Vivienda offers a staging service to outfit homes for sale on the real estate market.

“It does an interesting job of equating the value of purchasing a quality home with quality furnishings,” Pires said. “These are typically homes selling for $1 million-plus. It’s a soft approach to marketing, and it establishes the product with the target demographic.”

And since many of the current home owners bought at the top of the real estate bubble, staging also is a needed service.

“It’s important to have a great-looking house to show if you’re looking to get the best price,” Pires said.

In-home consulting is another service that encourages customers to relate with a business.

“All this can be tied into communications in general through e-mail blasts, Twitter and Facebook,” Pires said.

Special events, especially for higher-end retailers, can help tie stores to the image or values they want to project. Pires cited the example of a retailer that staged a mini-photo gallery event with edgy, artistic, modern photography.

“That’s exactly the kind of store they are,” he said. “If you can translate that event into what’s available at the store in terms of furniture, that can be an image builder.”

Fundraising and benefits tied to current events such as the relief effort in Haiti, or to causes important to your store’s demographic can help define a retailer’s place in customers’ minds.

“You can go a couple of ways—find things that are relevant to what’s happening out in the world,” Pires said. “On the other hand, you might want something tied into the values you believe are important to your customer base. … It depends on what people are passionate about in your region.”

Freebies such as an in-home consultation, or even a salesperson’s offering to sketch out a customer’s room to help choose appropriate goods, help build links.

“In my business, if it’s a difficult sell, I will typically say ‘Give me a chance,’” Pires said. “I’ll give them a taste of something for free, maybe a couple of Web site changes they can track for effect. … Then we might be able to move into ‘Phase 2.’ Go the extra mile to give them a reason to come to your store instead of shopping for price alone.”

While relationship marketing is particularly applicable to higher-priced stores, promotional retailers shouldn’t completely ignore its possibilities.

“Even if consumers are going to you for price, that’s still a relationship, and if the store is junky or the in-store service or delivery is terrible, they won’t be back,” Pires noted. “Those experiences go back to creating loyalty, and loyalty is a relationship. You can pursue a loyalty program, but it will be futile if the experience at your store is terrible.

“It’s cheaper to maintain a client than it is to find a new client.”

There are millions of web users researching or shopping for furniture on a daily basis. These consumers come from every walk of life and as a whole seek out just about every furniture style and price-point. One of the current issues is these customers are being funneled into websites of larger, and often more generalized, companies because most businesses simply do not create an online presence to compete for the online traffic that exists.

The main reason for this is most independent furniture retailers and vendors avoid the Internet because they don’t understand it or think it’s just too expensive to make a difference. For example, most stores still do not appeal to potential costumers with a quality online experience. Most vendors don’t think their website is relevant to consumers because they think that only their buyers will use it. Either way, these businesses are making a big and costly mistake in their judgement. With furniture buyers using the Internet as their main research vehicle, more retailers and vendors need to provide users with informative and appealing websites to become part of a costumers’ research mix.

Following is a small example. If a user types in “Italian leather sofa Northridge CA” in Google the top search results that appear (not counting pay-per-click ads), are classified ads of people selling used sofas. Only one local retailer appears on the first page in a large city within Los Angeles County that has nearly one million residents and many furniture stores. This happens simply because most Northridge retailers don’t even have a basic website.

Once any furniture business realizes the great number of potential customers that are online and further embrace the Internet then the path to success becomes clearer.

Building a Successful Strategy

Furniture businesses need to understand that when considering an online strategy they need to take a step back and understand that it needs to be developed in tune with their overall marketing strategy in mind. Furniture businesses need to appreciate that furniture is fashion, and fashion is all about lifestyle. This means that their approach must appeal to their consumers’ lifestyles. Similarly to other fashion markets, such as apparel, a furniture business must have a unique perspective in which to build their identity upon and that consumers can relate to. The great advantage that independent furniture retailers have is they typically focus on a specific furniture style and can provide costumers with great value due to their focus, expertise and understanding of their furniture. A similar concept applies to vendors. Independent of what furniture style or price-point they sell, all vendors are unique by nature and have their own appeal. The basis of a good strategy is digging deep to uncover what makes their business unique and leading from that perspective. From their image to their messages, and from their website to their e-mail signatures, businesses need to show off their unique values in every way.

Once this big picture strategy has been considered, businesses can then focus on how that strategy translates to their web presence. Thankfully a web strategy doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive, although it does have to be well executed and maintained. Once the strategy is working then more can be invested into enhancing the results.

For both furniture retailers and vendors, a website needs to look good, be well organized and inviting. This can be done without a lot of bells and whistles. In fact, a basic HTML website with good content about the company, location and detailed product information can go a very long way in getting quality search engine results. Obviously a more sophisticated website is always better.

For example, a furniture company’s website should provide enough content on the site so that if a user searches Google for a product they learned about by typing in the product’s name, style or number their website has a better chance of coming up on the search. For retailers, content needs to include their geographic location and contact information on every page. By providing content that blends relevant company and product information with information that communicates their unique values a furniture company will begin to create a niche and build quality search engine results.

Another important point to understand about the web is that results are not built overnight, whether it be search engine placement, traffic or actual leads. This also then means that a website must do everything it can to entice the user to provide their information, most importantly their e-mail once they are on the website. Then they can start to build a list of users that they can stay in contact with on a regular basis. If a user doesn’t become a client on their first visit, it doesn’t mean they won’t become a regular client later on down the line.

The Basics of a Good Online Strategy:

Here are some basic areas to consider when building a good online strategy that helps drive traffic and engage users:

• Online Videos: People love being entertained. Even the simplest videos featuring a showroom or set of products can draw attention. People remember a great percentage of what they see and hear, and video is the perfect medium. Also users like to share videos through emails, blogs and social networking sites.

• A Blog: Blogs are a great platform to show a business’ perspective on furniture, design and fashion as long as the content supports that business’ perspective and product type in some form or another. Users enjoy subscribing to Blogs that are informative and can teach them something new about a topic they like.

• Good Content: It can’t be stressed enough that a web presence needs good content. Item information, descriptions, taglines and even SKUs are key pieces of information that get picked up by search engines. Content should also create a mood, set a tone and express how a product can appeal to the target customer’s lifestyle.

• E-mails: Furniture businesses should stay in contact with customers at least once or twice a month. These can feature a product, discuss some relevant news, give advice or a promotional offer. This is one of the best and most direct ways to build website traffic, stay top-of-mind and generate business.

• Sharing Links: A furniture website should provide basic share features so users can email a web page or post a product on Facebook, all which will lead back to the source website.

• Social Networking: Similar to blogs social Networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter are good ways to share product information, news and announcements. This will help further extend propagate a website though the Internet while helping a company stay top of mind with its customers.

• Coding and Optimization: A website needs be built in a way that the pages of the site have enough relevant content, usually text and supporting images, to be picked up by search engines. Also, every page should be coded to where the descriptions and keyword meta tags relate to the content on the page and include some relevant company information where applicable.

• Links: It is important that independent furniture retailers have links on their websites pointing to the websites of brand they carry and, and vice-versa. This mutual support will help create greater traffic for both the retailer and vendor.

Although there are other areas of a good online strategy that will come into play, such as Search Engine Optimization and paid advertising, these are some of the basics that will help provide natural and lasting results.

Once developed, the good online strategy will start to attract costumers that are directly related to the products being offered because the approach is based on consumers’ wants and needs. As mentioned earlier, this is why the strategy should be based on the company’s unique values so as to provide users with a memorable and distinct experience while making better use of the natural way in which search engines work.

Everyone Wins

The reality is that the web offers a tremendous amount of opportunity for both furniture vendors and retailers. The main issue though for independent retailers and vendors is that the larger online retailers are capturing most online users that are searching for furniture. As more retailers and vendors build a good online strategy and web presence they will be able to filter in customers that are right for them by having a visible presence that is relevant to the actual needs of their customers. Collectively these companies can begin to build a much larger online network of companies and to level the online playing field.

A company’s Brand could be better understood as the expression and essence of its personality and psyche. In other words, whether a company realizes it or not, they are a brand. They are an entity that is constantly communicating and interacting with all of those that come into contact with it, on all levels. Although there are several creative branding practices that work to embed companies, products and services into our minds, the true brand experience is ultimately a holistic one. Even products are mediums that carry a company’s values to the consumer and further ingrains their brand.

The most successful and conscious companies embrace branding as a tool to help manifest their underlying corporate mission, which ultimately is (or should be) to make a contribution to society. They continuously refine and evolve their brand to give form and emotional tangibility to their philosophy and mission, ingrain their existing values and create new value in an ever-changing world.

A great example of the modern-day brand is BMW. BMW is a company that was founded on the promise of performance and quality. Those values are still part of their brand to this day, but BMW has also evolved to meet the demands of the world around it. It has embraced technology and global concerns as a means to maintain its brand’s position. By doing so BMW has built on its founding values and created new value. The video presented here is about their electric vehicle concept. It illustrates, on many levels, the various degrees that their brand has manifested, evolved and continues to propagate.

Video about their new electric car concept:
http://www.bmw.tv/intl/us/video.do?articleID=6401&spaceID=4&channelID=12

Teaser video:
http://www.bmw.tv/intl/us/video.do?articleID=6394&spaceID=4&channelID=12

December 10, 2009
LOS ANGELES, CALIF.

Armen Living has donated furniture pieces from its new fall collection to be sold at this month’s Project Angel Food “Divine Design 2009″ fundraising event. This unique shopping extravaganza, held December 3-7 in Beverly Hills, offered fashion, home, beauty and gift items at 50-90% off, with the proceeds going to provide meals to men, women and children affected by HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

Mr. & Dr. Kevin Kevonian at the Divine Design Fundraiser

“We supported Divine Design because 100% of the proceeds from the sale directly benefit Project Angel Food’s mission,” said Kevin Kevonian, CEO of Armen Living.

Project Angel Food delivers 13,000 meals each week throughout Los Angeles County and is celebrating 20 years of service.

“The event also provided an opportunity to expose our revamped Armen Living brand and furniture collection to the trendsetting young urban consumers to whom we target, offering great feedback” Kevonian added.

Armen Living recently changed its name from Armen Art Furniture and is in the midst of a major rebranding campaign that repositions the company and its products as “Furniture for Contemporary Lifestyles.”

Among the pieces donated was Armen Living’s classic 5th Avenue Armless Club Chair – a luxuriously sleek and retro “mod” leisure chair design upholstered in plush velvet.

Pieces from Armen Living’s Fall 2009 collection displayed at the Divine Design 2009 event in Beverly Hills, which benefited Project Angel Food.

For more information on Armen Living, visit the company’s website at www.armenliving.com or contact MVC Agency by phone at (818) 718-2005 or email at pr@mvcagency.com.

Los Angeles, CA (December 08, 2009) — Italmond Furniture recently named MVC Agency its agency of choice to direct a comprehensive rebranding campaign to establish the company as a recognized leader in the high-end furniture market.

The custom furniture manufacturer – which works with designers and the hospitality industry – was acquired by new owners in 2007 and with the help of MVC is now positioning itself to take advantage of the rapidly changing furniture industry and the subsequent market opportunities expected in 2010 and beyond.

“Italmond’s mission has always been to manufacture the most exquisite custom furniture and provide customers with a superb experience at every step. Now our image, messages, and marketing will further build on that promise,” said Barbara Jiron, Italmond’s Director of Operations.

Italmond Furniture has a 27-year history in the industry and an acclaimed reputation for its creation and manufacturing of fine traditional and transitional pieces featuring quality wood, fine finishes and fabrics, and flawless custom work. The company will further broaden the scope of its designs to include upscale contemporary pieces equally suited for luxurious and high-end spaces.

“We searched for an agency with a modern approach to furniture marketing that had a track record of successes and could strategically fuse traditional, online, and new media,” Jiron explained. “It is crucial that they understand the high expectations of Italmond’s designer clientele and that their strategy also reflects the lifestyle of our end consumers. We feel this is essential for growth in today’s changing furniture industry.”

“MVC’s primary goal is to rightfully place Italmond at the very top of its market segment in terms of their brand position and the values that it projects about its products and services,” said Jason Pires, President of MVC Agency. “We are starting with a recreation of Italmond’s logo and development of new key messages and taglines, and then we will completely redevelop their website, including its look, feel, and content.”

The revamped website, www.italmond.com, will feature their existing collection of 500 pieces and will allow users to easily prepare and submit custom orders, including options to choose their starting design, materials, colors, and fabrics – while also submitting their own reference images.

MVC is a creative marketing agency specializing in brand development and advertising for the luxury lifestyles industries and specializes in the home furnishings.

For more information, contact (818) 718-2005 or pr@mvcagency.com.

These days music festivals have to do much more than only call for peace and unity, they also have to set an example and teach. At least that’s the perspective of Music Fan Festival. Music Fan Festival’s mission is to strike a chord with visitors and music lovers from around the world  about preserving the environment, education and equality through every facet of the festival experience. Details to be revealed in early 2010.

Shown here are Music Fan Festival’s logo, tagline and initial corporate presentation which were created and designed by MVC Agency.

Recently during one of MVC’s rebranding campaigns for one of our clients we had to take down their old website. While content was being developed for the new website we still needed to have something online that people could get an idea of what the brand was about and that allowed us to start creating a buzz about their new products. We decided on a simple 2 page website that featured a video showcasing the new brand and furniture collection. It paid off big time. Although the average web user typically will not spend more than 5 seconds looking at any given web page, we discovered that users were captivated by the video and would spend on average 2 minutes and 30 seconds watching the video. In fact, that was about the length of the whole video. This means that most people who went to the site after they saw the PR and emails about the new brand actually watched the entire video. Most importantly though is that the results for our client was inspiring. Buyers began to contact them about the new products they saw and were ready to discuss new orders. Here’s a link to that video:

Now, I am not saying that you should immediately take your site down and put up a page with a video. Not by any means. Web video has to be handled on a case by case basis and needs a good strategy and great content to pay off. What I am saying is that it works extremely well in generating results and should be a part of any company’s branding and marketing strategy. In fact, we use it for most of our clients.

Another B2B video created by MVC: