FURNITURE NEEDS TO J.U.M.P.!: A bailout of solid marketing methods could help the industry to recover faster

The furniture industry needs to J.U.M.P. — Just Use Marketing Principles — as fast and as high as possible to regain stability and purpose: Becoming extraordinary advocates of helping people live more comfortably and better with style and design according to their means.

Retraining to achieve the ability to J.U.M.P. is the way to position for the future, instead of scrambling for business any way you can.

Scrambling is undisciplined action, and is no way to prepare for an eventual turnaround.

What’s more reckless? Scrambling is for eggs, not business because the yoke will be on you if you fail to J.U.M.P!

Following and benefiting from strong marketing principles are achievable, beginning with a few deceptively, interrelated simple questions:

• What is my mission?

• What is my responsibility?

• What is my enduring purpose?

• Why are home furnishings important to better living?

Answer these questions and others fairly and honestly in the context of an uncertain economy, demanding a serious reexamination of values within a world of scarcity.

Need help answering those questions? Talk to consumers, the people who want to live more comfortably and better with affordable style and design.

If you’re a retailer, the fullest answers are not necessarily coming from manufacturers. Likewise, if you’re a manufacturer, the most significant answers are not automatically coming from retailers. 

Then where? The market has the answers, and that means the people who want to live more comfortably and better with furniture.

All of what I’ve presented is easier said than done for a fragmented, headless industry that been running scattered, even amok.

For more than a half century, the debilitating fragmentation has, ironically, congealed and ossified into an institutional, jagged and inflexible Rock of Gibraltar, which rhymes with falter.

An industry unable to J.U.M.P. is paying a dear price: Confusion in the marketplace, loss of credibility, lack of cohesive message except “sale,” and a perverse delight in sales prevention.

Tough, but true. Why? The rule of the jungle prevails, despite all the platitudes from all quarters of the industry that nickels-and-dimes each other whenever possible.

A pernicious, self-defeating industry culture pervades: Get what you can now and the hell with others, which is another way of saying: Kick the can down the road as along and as far as you can, and get out leaving others barely alive and kicking.

As long as the industry prefers fragmented thought and action, its ability to congeal a message with cogent action will be just a wistful whisper of eggheads like me.

Hope is in the air, but hope is neither a strategy nor a tactic. Hope is an attitude, producing a marvelous and superlative alchemy that moves individuals and industry institutions to identify issues and challenge with resolve for the greater good.

While industry fragmentation is collective, defragmentation begins individually, with personal responsibility.

In a mercantile context consider what Sixteenth Century English poet John Donne had to say about the interrelation of who we are and what we do:

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man (retailer, manufacturer, supplier, designer) is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

If this is just gibberish and too highfalutin for you, then you can’t or are afraid to J.U.M.P., leaving you on the self-limited ground abandoned to P.U.M.P., Purposely Undermining Marketing Principles.

Comments

[furniture]

I agree with your comments. It will be an interesting year in 2009 with slower home sales which likely fueled a lot of previous business.

[David Lively]

You are making a great point in an interesting way.

I sent this quote to a group of forty or so retailers Friday.

"The American people made Ford Motor Company what it is. We have nothing the public did not give us. No surplus exists for personal benefit — every surplus is provided for future use. The future is here, and we are going to do our utmost — risk everything, if necessary — to use this surplus which the public, through its dealings with us, has provided, to see if we cannot make what the country needs most — work, jobs."

Henry Ford said this February 11, 1932.

The times are interesting.

Soloman said centuries ago, "There is nothing new under the sun."

Surely our beloved industry will figure this out.