Report of the MCAA Marketing Committee
Words: David Hill, Tim O'TooleThe Marketing Committee is charged with both marketing the association as well as
marketing the use of masonry materials. This past year, we conducted another
successful Excellence in Masonry Competition held in Tampa. We look forward to an even
larger program at Masonry Showcase in Las Vegas. The entry forms are being developed
for distribution. Our Architects Masonry Symposium was marginally successful last
year. The program content was strong and the few attendees that participated had high
remarks for the program. Unfortunately, the program has a significant price tag and
demands strong staff attention. Since the MCAA will be offering educational programs
for CSI attendees at Construct America in 2005, the we are considering postponing this
years Symposium and shift our focus to developing a strong educational session for
2005's CSI Show.
"MASONRY: IT MAKES A VILLAGE"
A new program that the committee is evaluating is the Masonry Institute of
Washington's "Masonry: It Makes A Village" contest where teams of architects and
contractors design and build a unique masonry project whose projects are judged
against other teams projects. What we are looking at is to offer a national contest
held at Masonry Showcase beginning in 2005 in conjunction with the CSI Show and
Construct America. We believe that this event will be a major highlight of CSI
attendees and become a significant promotional event for our industry. CSI attendees
will undoubtedly be drawn to see this event where fellow architects are competing. It
is our hope that local chapters will enter teams in the national event which will be
held in Chicago.
WEB-SITE
In conjunction with Education Chairman David Hill, the association evaluated our web
presence and solutions to expand our web-site. The solution was to hire a Manager of
Internet Technology. Three months ago, we hire Tim O'Toole to spearhead this effort
for the MCAA. In his short tenure with the association, he has made significant
progress in expanding our site and making it more interactive. In addition, he is
developing a prototype website that members can use to develop a website for their own
companies.
MASONRY EXECS COUNCIL PROMOTION CAMPAIGN
One of our associations long range goals is to educate masonry customers on the
benefits of masonry systems and to make mason contractors a greater focal point in
masonry promotion. To that end, 16 of our industry's local contractor chapter
executive directors have met with our national staff to begin hammering out a major
advertising campaign that will promote masonry systems rather than specific materials.
The group called "Masonry Industry Execs Council" will be presenting this major
initiative at the MCAA Annual Meeting in Las Vegas. Each group will encourage their
Boards to attend the meeting and see the presentation. If successful the initiative
will include a new website that will provide customers free information about
specifying, designing and building masonry systems, comparative information and other
critical information to promote masonry. To direct customers to this site, a major
contractor sponsored ad campaign will not only promote masonry but direct the
customers to this new site where they will find 11 modules on critical masonry issues.
This will be the first ever, national ad campaign directed by the mason contractor
sector of our industry. The consensus of the Council was that systems information is
the critical missing link to industry promotion, a link that customers need to ease
their concerns about designing with masonry.
NATIONAL MASONRY COST BOOK
The committee has researched the development of a national masonry cost book which was
approved by the Board by not funded. We believe that since cost information will be a
component of the Execs Council campaign, we may be able to accomplish provide cost
comparison through the web-site.