Firms' Expanding Internet Presence

Nation's Business, August, 1998 by Sharon Nelton

If you go to www.musgroves.com on the World Wide Web, you'll find yourself visiting the site of Musgrove Family Mortuary, a family firm based in Eugene, Ore.

Through words and pictures, you'll meet Wayne and Kay Musgrove, their sons, Mark and Jeffrey, and their daughters-in-law, Diane and Sharon.

You'll learn a bit about the business's 114-year history and the Musgroves' philosophy. They are, you'll read, "committed to relieving the stress and easing the burden of grief of the families who depend on us, regardless of race, religion, or financial status."

The Musgroves are among the growing number of business-owning families that are turning to the Internet to market their businesses and, in some instances, even sell products or services.

"We're not at the point by any means where the majority [of family firms] have Web sites up, but they're coming online fast," says Patricia A. Frishkoff, director of the Austin Family Business Program at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Earlier this year, she conducted a workshop to help family-business owners determine whether they should capitalize on the Web as part of their marketing strategy.

Like the Musgroves, many family firms use their sites to promote the family dimension of their businesses. The reason Musgrove Family Mortuary does so on its two-year-old site, says Jeff Musgrove, is that there are so many corporate takeovers of funeral homes. "We feel that being family-owned, we can offer better, more personalized service, and we want to promote that," he says.

When companies market themselves as family firms, says Frishkoff, "it's like greeting [customers] and trying to get to know them on a personal level. They're trying to extend that sense of warm, friendly relationship."

The strategy is really no different from advertising as a family business in another medium, Frishkoff says. If a family chooses to capitalize on the family aspect, she says, "it's a strategic positioning that I would expect a family business to take throughout its marketing, not just on the Web."

You can use the Web to build awareness of your products or services, develop leads, provide information, sell products, and provide customer support, according to April L. Lougheed of LockHeed Guidance, Inc., a Fishers, Ind., company that designs Web sites and devises marketing strategies for using the Web. She says a Web site allows you to reduce phones and staff, save on postal and printing costs, update information immediately, and create a demographic customer database automatically.

Seeing What Others Have Done

One of the best ways to begin thinking about whether you want to promote your family business on the Web and how you might go about it is to visit other family-business Web sites and determine what you like and dislike.

You can make your site fun, for example, At www.jellybelly.com, the site for Herman Goelitz, Inc., the Fairfield, Calif.-based maker of Jelly Belly jelly beans and other candies, you call up topics by clicking on brightly colored jelly beans. The site features a cartoon jelly bean that serves as your guide and sometimes does an energetic back flip. When you want to return to the site's home page, a jelly bean will "bean" you home.

You can also make your site funny. Columbia Sportswear Co. in Portland, Ore., uses scowling pictures of the family-business matriarch and chairwoman, Gert Boyle, 74, otherwise known as "Mother Boyle." She's promoted as "one tough mother," and the company slogan is "Where Mother's Nature Rules."

The approach fits in with a larger advertising strategy promoting Boyle. Columbia's sales have grown from $3 million since the campaign began in 1984 to $353 million last year--information gleaned from the company site at www.columbia.com.

Some sites are very interactive. At the Musgrove Family Mortuary site, for example, you can fill out an online form to plan your own funeral and send the form to the company electronically.

Other companies provide useful information that promotes their products. Based in Salisbury, Md., third-generation Perdue Farms (www.perdue.com), the second-largest poultry producer in the United States, lets you print out chicken and turkey recipes and offers tips on cooking and storing poultry.

Cost Calculations

The costs of Web-site development vary according to the site's complexity. FuneralNet is a company in Portland, Ore., that develops Web sites and specializes in the funeral industry; the firm designed the Musgrove site.

FuneralNet's president, Michael Turkiewicz, says a basic start-up plan that includes four pages of text, graphics, and pictures costs $1,000. For $4,000, the client can get a site with up to 30 pages. (You can click on samples of each level of Web site that the company designs at www.funeral.net. com)

It costs about $650 to $900 a year to maintain a site, Turkiewicz says, plus the $35 annual registration fee for the site's name and about $20 a month for access to the Internet.

If a family business has the talent in-house, it can develop its own Web site. Aaron Hogue, president of Hogue Grips, a Paso Robles, Calif., company that makes handgun grips and rifle stocks, put together his firm's site. At the bottom of its home page at www.getgrip.com., there's this message: "Web Site designed by Aaron Hogue (I have nobody to blame hut myself)!"