Scooter Store shakes up advertising strategy

NEW BRAUNFELS, Texas - The quintessential TV ads from The Scooter Store--the ones that inform viewers that they may qualify for power chairs or scooters at little or no cost to them--will become a thing of the past as part of a new campaign.

"The previous campaign was more of a straightforward, just-the-facts-ma'am campaign," said Doug Foster, the chief marketing office at The Scooter Store. "The new campaign is an opportunity for us to capture the power mobility benefit, and do it in a tone and manner that embodies the culture and spirit of the company. I think that our advertising can be a catalyst to making freedom and independence real in the minds of consumers."

To help it shape its new campaign, The Scooter Store announced in August that it has partnered with Omnicom Group, a strategic holding company that comprises big-name advertising agencies like Zimmerman Partners and marketing agencies like Daggerwing Group. It will continue to work with agencies like Eicoff for ad planning and buying, and Epsilon for database analytics.

In addition to changing the general look and feel of the ads, The Scooter Store will swap its strategy of one-ad-and-message-fit-all for a strategy of numerous ads with different messages, depending on the target audience.

"The baby boomers grew up in a different era than the depression-era seniors, so your messaging and what you say about the products and the company needs to be different," said Mike Pfister, executive vice president of government relations and external affairs for The Scooter Store.

But The Scooter Store aims to have an impact on more than just consumers with its new campaign.

"Not only do we have to put the right messages out there that make it clear to the medical professionals, caregivers and ultimately consumers, but also we want policy-makers in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., to understand more about this product category, and what it is and isn't," Pfister said. "We think the messages that we put in front of people in the future are going to be looked on very differently by policy-makers."

At the end of the day, The Scooter Store, like many HME companies, has been bruised by recent reimbursement cuts, and with more effective and more targeted ads, it hopes to stretch its advertising dollars.

"This is one of many strategies that we have in place to help us through this stormy period that DME is experiences right now," Pfister said. "Clearly, the objective is to be able to find the right customers at a cheaper price point. We all have to do that."