No Gas? Thumb a Ride

Sometimes we need to figure out what's really going on.  “A drill company thought it was selling drills.  Their customers were actually buying holes”(25).  I pulled this quote from a mind-sharpening book Alan M. Webber put together, called “Rules of Thumb.”  Webber describes 52 truths he picked up while hobnobbing with folks like those at the Harvard Business Review and Fast Company magazines.

Webber sums it up as Rule #6:  “If You Want To See With Fresh Eyes, Reframe The Picture”(25).  Most companies, he states, “don’t see what business they’re really in.”  He draws from the classic article, “Marketing Myopia,” by Ted Levitt, who famously differentiated between marketing and selling.  Levitt taught that selling was all about exchanging your product for cash.  Marketing had to do with satisfying the actual needs of the customer through the product:

…a truly marketing-minded firm tries to create value-satisfying goods and services that consumers will want to buy.  What it offers for sale includes … how it is made available to the customer, in what form, when, under what conditions, and at what terms of trade (Levitt 143).

I’m an activity professional.  A good nursing program can help keep our residents alive.  A well-run activity program will remind our residents of the reasons they have for wanting to BE alive.  Is that something they or their families would be interested in buying?

So, how does my job in activities at a CCRC intersect with marketing?  “KTR,” they tell us in our national certification classes, “Know Thy Resident.”  We do our best to find out what makes each resident tick, what they used to like to do but can’t anymore, what they might enjoy doing now if they had the chance and didn’t talk themselves out of it, what they never really did before but might someday, at some precious moment, decide to give a try.  We know that how we stage an activity, what we call it, what time and day we put it on the calendar, where we hold it, and what incentives go with it, will make a BIG difference in participation and satisfaction levels.  We market to those with dementia as much as to those who are cognitively intact.  Just because someone has dementia doesn’t mean they don’t want a life.  So, yes, part of what makes for a well-run activity program is the marketing that we activity professionals do with the residents.

Let’s say I have a resident who won’t come out for crafts, games, exercise, music, bingo, anything.  But they are interested in joining a group of other residents for ice cream and conversation on the patio after supper, when the worst heat of the summer day is past.  What are they buying?  Ice cream?  Nope.  They tell me they are still full from supper.  People and conversation?  Just left that a few minutes ago in the dining room.  Sweat and the occasional fly?  Not so much.  The chance to feel like what they consider to be a “normal adult" again.  Absolutely.

Levitt said, “When people buy gas for their cars, they don’t really want the gasoline – they want the freedom to continue driving down the road” (145).  That is so true it makes me laugh.  I don’t want gasoline, do you?  Activity Directors (by whatever title we’re called) are not selling activities – we’re marketing freedom from “boredom, helplessness and loneliness,” as The Eden Alternative suggests in their vision statement.  Or maybe it’s freedom from meaninglessness and from anger about still being alive.  How do the residents define what they’re buying?  Some days it feels like we’re actually marketing an alternate reality where the residents are younger, more capable and controlling their own lives again.  Your activity professionals are doing successful marketing all the time to your target demographic.  If you want to increase your census numbers, maybe you should ask us how we do it.

©Donna Stuart, ADC      July 21, 2017

Levitt, Theodore. "Marketing Myopia." Best of HBR July-August 2004: 143, 145.

Webber, Alan M. Rules of Thumb. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2009.

http://www.edenalt.org/about-the-eden-alternative/mission-vision-values/

An Astronaut’s Guide To Activity Professional Training

How long does it take to get to the International Space Station (ISS) and back?  “The trip takes a lifetime,” according to Col. Chris Hadfield.  In his book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life On Earth, Hadfield describes what we call the "right stuff" looks like, feels like and costs.  The cost part is something he wants us to reframe.  You could say the cost included time spent behind the scenes in endless training, filling other ground-based jobs, helping other astronauts be successful, and marketing space exploration to the world.  He looks at it differently.

To Hadfield, training and experience are always good, even if you don’t use them directly. He was always signing up for extra training opportunities or teaching himself.  If he got to use his robotics training to install a giant robotic arm on the ISS, that was great.  If he learned to actually pilot the Soyuz capsule, but in the end, only got to go along for the ride, it was great because he got to understand the process better.   If he taught himself “Rocket Man” on the guitar, hoping that Eton John would invite him onstage for a duet, and Elton didn’t, well, Hadfield would still know how to play “Rocket Man” on the guitar.  It still made him a better astronaut and more interesting human being.  In the activity profession, we have lots of opportunities for extra training in things like dementia care, use of technology, horticulture, public speaking or event planning.  Some of this we’ll put into practice.  Yay!  Some will be back-shelved.  But all training increases the depth of our competence as activity professionals.

In a sense, everybody hopes to find the perfect job and stay there forever.  However, moving to a new job, a new facility, or a different level of responsibility can be good for your professional development.  That includes moves that are not necessarily upward.  Hadfield worked many different jobs over the years:  test pilot, astronaut trainee, ISS Operations in Houston, capsule communicator, NASA Operations at Star City in Russia, NASA robotics, and, of course, sitting on committees.  Most of those jobs could not hope to match the apparent glamour of astronaut in orbit, astronaut spacewalker, and astronaut just back from space.  But, they gave him a better big picture perspective and made him more useful no matter where he was.  I used to be a teacher.  However, when I switched to healthcare, I started out as a CNA and then dropped to merely NA.   I sat with groups of residents at high risk for falls, raced around the building delivering ice, accompanied residents in the van to outside appointments, and ran the dining room on weekends.  Was this useful experience once I joined the activity department?  Oh, yeah.

 ©  Donna Stuart, ADC    January 29, 2017

Hadfield, Chris. An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013.