Report of the MCAA Marketing Committee

Words: John Smith Jr.The 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.

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