Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

An Asian Retirement Community

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Readers of this blog are by now familiar with one of my many obsessions, that being the impact of multi-generational cultures on the demand for supportive seniors housing. The hypothesis is that in cultures where families look after their elders at home until they are so frail they need residential care, the intermediate step of supportive housing (IL, congregate care, service-enriched) is skipped. Here in very multi-cultural British Columbia, there is lots of evidence indicating that this hypothesis is a sound one. For example, in spite of a very large Chinese population (which typically cares for elders at home) there is only one small private pay supportive housing project targeted at the Chinese community.

But a recent issue of the Journal of Active Aging focuses on a retirement community targeted directly at the Asian community in Fremont, California that has been around for a decade. Fremont is a community of just over 200,000 people that is part of the much larger San Francisco Bay area (over 7 million people). The 64 unit project is owned and operated by Aegis Living and is called Aegis Gardens. The article is very positive, highlighting the linguistic skills of the staff (all, at a minimum, speak Cantonese or Mandarin or both), the design of the project (incorporating feng shui principles), and the activities (tai chi, mah-jong, origami). Food is not addressed in the article.

Outcomes have been extremely successful—80% of residents participate in physical activity programs, falls are a fraction of what they are at most communities, average age is older than at most other communities, staff turnover is extremely low.

The president of Aegis is quoted in the article as saying the company needed to negotiate a very steep learning curve on the way to success.

Part of that learning curve is described in an article in the San Jose Mercury News in 2004. That is a very long time ago but it is interesting to note that way back then, residents were upset. Here are some excerpts from the article:

But in the last few months, residents say, beloved Chinese staff members have resigned or been released, and replaced by employees who speak only English. The new staff members have implemented several culturally puzzling changes: buying wine for “happy hour,” moving a pingpong table into the tai chi space, and banning residents from cooking zong zi, a special rice dumpling prepared for the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival.

Residents have also complained that the center only spent $5.25 per resident a day on food. Though management has since raised the food budget to $5.75 a day, the food budget remains an issue. [note: $5.00 per day on food is quite common in 2011]

The Aegis Gardens situation is a “typical business problem” among companies trying to serve ethnic communities, said Felipe Korzenny, Florida State University professor of marketing communities and a local marketing consultant. The Aegis company has no Asian-American managers or corporate executives outside of its Chinese-oriented facility, Lucas said.

Note that was way back in 2004 and clearly, Aegis has addressed those issues. But the fact remains that in a metropolitan area of over 7 million people, where 20% are Asian, there is only one very small retirement community for those 1.5 million people.

Perhaps there are others and if any blog readers know of them please let me know.

Note: in US demographics “Asian-American” typically includes people of East, South East and South Asian descent.

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Integration or segregation of assisted living services in independent living communities

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

I have posted about this before and there is also a section on the subject in my book The Future of Seniors Housing: Planning, Building and Operating Successful Seniors Housing Projects (now available on our website and soon to be available on Amazon etc).

The thing is, I think I have changed my mind since the book was published (that would be last month). Aha you may think, she is already cleverly planning the second edition. That’s not true although I do think about another book from time to time. What has changed my mind is talking to many people in the industry in recent weeks about the provision of assisted living services in retirement communities. The Lumina Group is working with a new entrant to the industry and it is up to us to advise him about the right strategy—he has no preconceived notions and no established model he is unwilling to deviate from. Should he plan to deliver personal care services to his residents who need them wherever in the building they may live, or should he develop a separate wing for his assisted living customers?

The book comes down on the side of the segregationist model although when you think about it, the term “segregation” has so many negative connotations that its use should immediately raise red flags. But the support for the segregationist model reflects quite specific circumstances in which the assisted living residents are really very frail and receiving significant levels of personal care—hours per day, not minutes per day. In those situations, more independent residents may feel very uncomfortable living cheek by jowl with their much frailer neighbours and as Victor Regnier has pointed out, the feelings may well be mutual. (See my book for further information, or any of Victor Regnier’s of course).

But when daily hours of care are not so extreme, most industry people we have polled strongly support integration. I will go into more detail about why in later posts. In the meantime, I am working on the second edition of The Future of Seniors Housing.

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I Have Seen the Future…and It’s Open Kitchens!

Friday, October 8th, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I toured the new Tapestry at UBC project, which just opened. Like its sister project, Tapestry O’Keefe, the UBC project offers both rental units and condo units. One of the things that struck me about the dining room was the open kitchen, which is sort of like an Earl’s. I wondered whether seniors might like that idea, or not. It’s unusual in upscale communities, although there may be a grill area adjacent to the dining room where special events occur. The Dunfield in Toronto offers this feature—there’s a grill-to-order event every Friday night. Some less upscale communities have open kitchens, but these are somewhat more reminiscent of hockey arenas than an Earl’s Restaurant.

So I was happy to tour the Belletini in Seattle last week, not exactly a sister to the Tapestry projects but definitely related by virtue of management by Leisure Care. The Belletini too has an open kitchen and according to both the Chef and the Marketing Manager, the residents love it! They love to interact with the chefs, they love to see the food being cooked, they like the general liveliness created by all that activity. There is a counter facing the kitchen that has six quite high stools for eating and watching. Apparently these stools are occupied the minute the kitchen opens at 5, notwithstanding the fact that when I say the stools are tall, I mean they are tall! The Chef told me that if people need help climbing up on them, they help them—no big deal.

So there you go. Never hold a preconceived notion. More on the Belletini and another Seattle-area project in forthcoming posts.

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Bad Ads

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

I have a few favorite ads I like to point to as bad examples of marketing to the older senior crowd (75+). One shows a 60 something very buff man in a bathing suit standing beside his surf board. The project in question is not an active adult golf community on the west coast of Vancouver Island where the picture might just be barely plausible (although the buff man would have to be wearing a wetsuit to withstand the cold water) — it is a supportive housing project where people get two meals a day, weekly laundry, housekeeping, and an emergency response system. No one remotely resembling this man lives in the project, or will ever live in the project. Another of my favorites pictures is of a youngish couple (65-70 I’d guess) in full Mexican regalia, clearly ready to party. Those ads won’t appeal to the real target market (generally 80 year old widows), and if by chance a surfer should show up at the door he will know instantly that he is in the wrong place.  Active, independent seniors do not generally want to live in places where many residents are frailer than they are. Confusing or misleading ads serve no useful purpose whatsoever.

Sometimes ads feature the wrong people with the best of intentions. For example, a non-profit project I know included pictures of visible minorities in their ads for a while, trying to convey the message that they were an inclusive and welcoming project. Obviously that is a laudable goal, but the fact that there were almost no visible minorities in that particular community meant running the risk of not appealing to the true target market.

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