NHFA releases details on Web portal
Homefurnishings.com to be national marketing campaign
Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, April 15, 2009
HIGH POINT — The National Home Furnishings Assn. released details Tuesday on its upcoming Homefurnishings.com Web portal and national marketing campaign, including a cost estimate for participating retailers.
NHFA Chairman Doug Kays, who has shepherded plans for the program for three years - including an earlier attempt at co-branding with HGTV - said Homefurnishings.com will be the industry's only comprehensive national marketing program.
Kays promised this one will be more successful at bringing the industry and consumers together in one place and driving traffic to stores and suppliers prepared to pay for the exposure.
"It's been tried before, but never with the power of something like the Web behind it," Kays said.
The program's three elements are:
- National advertising in shelter and lifestyle publications and on consumer-oriented Web sites.
- A Web portal with content on home furnishings styles, color trends and other design topics, along with links to micro-Web sites of participating retailers and suppliers.
- A certified retailer program aimed at directing traffic to participating stores.
The cost to retailers will be on a per-store basis. NHFA estimates that a business doing $2 million in sales annually would pay $2,400 and $2,600 per store per year.
Kays said the cost is less than half what NHFA was asking under the proposed HGTV program, which didn't get off the ground. He said NHFA isn't asking retailers to increase their advertising budgets - just to reallocate spending for a program that will generate millions of impressions online, where today's consumer is more apt to start the furniture shopping process.
NHFA officially will begin pitching the program to retailers at the High Point Market in a series of seminars in the new Retailer Resource Center in Plaza Suites.
The portal will soft launch in October and include a national online consumer sweepstakes (expected to be repeated quarterly) where the winner will get $5,000 toward home furnishings through certified Homefurnishings.com retailers. The official launch will be in January. The NHFA expects to have an estimated annual budget of about $2 million to start, and projects it will grow to $8 million by 2012.
A link to a promotional video is available at homefurnishings.com.
