FAMILY BUSINESS Firms Find Using Family Ties Is Effective in Advertising By JACQUELINE FOX Staff Reporter It wasn’t that long ago when the notion of keeping the status of being a family-owned business hidden from the customer was considered common practice. For consumers, the term “family owned” used to be seen as a stigma, often implying “small” and “unreliable,” By contrast, consumers tended to believe that large corporations, particularly publicly traded ones, knew what they were doing because they had their “bigness” to fall back on. And, at least on paper, those companies could be held accountable and were likely to be in it for the long haul. Not anymore. The “family” in family owned has never been more marketable, particularly since scandals at large public companies began being reported in late 2001. And any business not already exploiting its family legacy by putting its family owned status front and center in advertising and marketing campaigns, say the experts, is depriving itself of vital opportunities. “There is an unmistakable trend of emphasizing a company’s ‘familiness’ today that you weren’t seeing much of not so long ago,” says John A. Davis, professor and faculty chair of the families and business program at Harvard Business School. Davis is also the owner of Santa Barbara-based Owner Managed Business Institute, a family business consulting firm for companies across the globe. “For many years there was this incredible bias that if you were publicly traded you were better,” said Davis. “But in light of recent scandals and other issues, I think we’ve come full circle. There is now a definite advantage to being private and it’s becoming more clear to the consumer that small- to mid-sized firms may be the best in the country to do business with.” You don’t have to tell that to Grandma Arnola. In case you haven’t heard her on the radio or seen her TV promotions, Arnola Huffman is the 87-year-old grandmother of Buster Huffman, president of Van Nuys-based Arnola Copper Repiping Inc., and the 13-year-old company’s official spokeswoman. “Trust Your Pipes to My Boys,” goes the tag line in Arnola’s marketing campaign, which and Huffman make no apologies for may seem a little schmaltzy, but is already elevating grandma to near-celebrity status. And that can’t be bad for business. “Let me put it to you this way,” says Huffman, describing what happened recently when one of his estimators pulled the company truck over to the side of the road for a brief respite from traffic and to clear some notes. “A guy drove up next to him in a DWP truck and yelled ‘hey you better get back to work or I’m tellin’ grandma,'” said Huffman. “There are a lot of companies out there that don’t care about quality. Our whole philosophy when we started was we wanted to do every job as if we were doing it for our own grandmother. We may not be the cheapest, but we are quality driven.” Study on trust Even large family owned such as E & J; Gallo Winery and Hallmark have recently put family members in their ads or somehow evoke the family legacy in their marketing campaigns. In fact, one of the nation’s largest and oldest family firms, S.C. Johnson & Son recently sponsored a study on trust in public companies. Roughly 61 percent of the survey respondents revealed that their level of trust in public firms had declined since the corporate scandals rocked Wall Street, compared to the 62 percent who said their level of trust in family owned companies had remained the same. Sure, there are exceptions. Take the case of John Rigas and his two sons, who were carted off in handcuffs last summer before millions of TV viewers, accused of bilking the family firm, Adelphia, and investors, out of more than $60 million, among other charges. But products that carry the value-added cache of being linked to a family enterprise are wildly popular with today’s largest consumer group. Aging baby boomers seeking to both embrace high-quality, high-tech life styles while nurturing the icons of their pre-adult lives, often deliberately choose smaller companies to do business with, whether subconsciously or not, because they believe doing so enforces their nostalgic goals. “Enough research has been done to show that people will tend to trust, at least a little bit more, a product that is family owned,” said Mike Trueblood, director of the Family Business Council at Cal State Fullerton. He is also a professor of consumer marketing and advertising, creative strategy and execution and family business dynamics at CSF and worked for some of the top ad agencies in the country for more than two decades. “I urge every one of my students to make a very big deal of this fact when they put their marketing materials together because I am convinced that what the family image communicates to consumers is an attention to detail, a high-quality of service and a dedication to longevity,” Trueblood said. “And these are not necessarily things you are going to get from your typical Fortune 500 company. Mom and Pop shops used to downplay their small size, but we know for a fact that people want to return to doing business with real people.” Catering to nostalgia Look for a continuation of tag lines including the phrases “generation,” “heritage” and “the legacy lives on” in marketing campaigns for more large corporations, because, not only do they employ savvy public relations experts, they clearly get it when it comes to nostalgia and the consumer’s urge to spend. “Even though Ford Motor Co. isn’t family owned, the company has featured the great grandson of Henry Ford in several of its ads, and it’s a very effective campaign,” said Trueblood. “Getting it” has always been the focus of the marketing strategy at Woodland Hills-based Vista Ford, a cluster of three dealerships on Ventura Boulevard run by Steve Shuken and his son and daughter. Vista also owns two dealerships in Oxnard and Ventura. According to Shuken, Vista doesn’t directly use the term “family owned” in its marketing campaigns, but refers to its dealerships as “The Vista Family.” Although Shuken scoffs at the notion of big companies reverting to what he called “ma-and-pa mania,” he agrees, family evokes trust. And he’s been making a pretty decent living off of that kind of trust since 1974. “I know for a fact that in almost all cases where a public company has taken over a family (car) dealership, their market share has decreased and so have their overall sales,” said Shuken. “We have always focused on the fact that we are a family and neighborhood business and it’s given us a competitive edge. Do we promote our family owned status? Maybe more now than before because of what’s been happening. But I’ve always incorporated it into our basic philosophy and it’s paid off for us because of the sensitivity levels and the degree of trust that family implies.”