Attention CEOs: Unleash your marketing executives for increased revenue

It is startling how small the ambitions are for retirement living and aged care operators when the opportunities are so urgent and great.

As a media group we have vision of much of the new business activity taking place across Australia – and alarmingly there isn’t much.

The problem

Consider this: optimistically there is less than 3,000 new retirement village homes that will be delivered this year; we need 6,000 every year to maintain historic 6% penetration.

In aged care, we require 8,000 new and refurbished beds every year. At best we are delivering 2,500.

It is easy to say land and building approvals are hard to achieve and funding in uncertain times is hard to get. But where is investing in the future? If you are not growing, you are dying, is the old saying.

But is property the only game in town?

The solution

Unleash your marketing executives. Their job is to create value for their employer. The godfather of modern marketing, Philip Kotler, in 1970 defined the role of your marketing executives is to:

“Identify a need and satisfy it”

Our sectors are overrun by unmet needs, and most operators are ignoring them. Examples:

Wellness Sells. Patrick Smith, owner of one retirement village in Southport (Henley on Broadwater), invested say $120,000 in HUR gym equipment and say $80,000pa in a professional personal trainer and now has 120 of his 132 residents using the gym at least four times a week. His 85-unit building is always full and his DMF-based price is 120% of the local prestige apartments.

Care Suites. Jeremy Nicoll, CEO of listed Arvida Group in NZ, is replacing aged care beds tied to daily care and accommodation fees, with DMF care suites under the Retirement Village Act with user pay care services. With demand exceeding supply, Arvida has a new future.

Disability accommodation. Uniting Communities in Adelaide built their first retirement village as a 21-storey tower in the CBD. They included a disability hotel that generates premium long stay room rates. Every older retirement village has unloved, hard to move homes. Conversion to long-term disability rentals can generate $100,000pa income each.

Serviced apartments deconstructed. Aveo is changing its service apartment proposition by doubling the price of the unit from say $200,000 with high fixed weekly fees to cover mandated meals and housekeeping services, to say $400,000 but small fixed weekly fees – the customer can decide which meals and services they want each week. The significant ingoing contribution subsidises the smaller operating losses of underutilised kitchen and staff facilities. Sales have jumped dramatically.

Unleash your marketers with Dr Peter Wilton

You have marketing executive talent in-house; it is time to unleash them.

How to start? Inspire them by enrolling them in our Strategy and Marketing Masterclass (29 August), which includes a major presentation by Dr Peter Wilton, a world expert in Customer Loyalty and Digital Disruption, and Marketing Professor at UC Berkeley.