Question: why stoke the media fire?

The retirement community sector is not being served well at the moment by individual marketers attempting to profit from the adversity of others.

Running negative ads consciously or subconsciously affects all operators (and their residents) in the sector.

See the story above about the small Tuggerah (Central Coast NSW) will accounting firm paying for a full page in the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald. To what benefit?

In the paid piece above, the Land Lease Community operator GemLife compares itself to retirement villages (in its press release they actually call their communities ‘retirement villages’) and state “entry and exit fees are rife within the industry and unfortunately, appear to exploit the elderly”.

“For this reason, we have never charged these outlandish fees in our company’s history.”

In its simplest form, comparative advertising rarely works for the advertiser.

“Various studies through the years have proven that comparative advertising has been responded to negatively. (F. Beard, “Comparative Advertising Wars: An Historical Analysis of Their Causes and Consequences”, Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2010, pp. 270-286.).

The Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) says “The consequences of getting a comparative advertising campaign wrong can be severe. There are substantial penalties for breaches of the Australian Consumer Law (of up to $1.1 million) as well as other orders which can be made including expensive corrective advertising, and of course, bad publicity”.

So what is the point?

Interestingly, while the Fairfax/Four Corners critique focuses on the retirement village sector, the government reviews, and especially in Queensland, are hauling in Land Lease Communities as well. Most probably not what they wanted.