Ready For Prime Time

January 3, 2003

Today’s pop quiz: Which character on a current TV hit show includes a stonemason in the family tree?
This isn’t exactly an easy one, and there’ll be no hints – you won’t wait long for the answer – but don’t feel bad if you didn’t know the answer. Just consider that plenty of viewers feel the same way about stone today … even after seeing it on television.
Our industry is living a charmed life in today’s unsteady economy, with excellent business growth. We sell a product that’s wildly popular, and we’re pegging that new demand with everything from a drop in materials prices to yupster homeowners choosing a Brazilian-granite kitchen makeover instead of a European summer sojourn.
Consider that television that always seems to be tuned to some channel, however. Finding anyone that actually advertises stone on the tube would be a rarity, but there are plenty of other influences to give stone a big push.
No, it’s not the answer to today’s question, unless you’re looking for customers to literally put on the slab. It’s not often you hear about old man Corrado, but his grandson – Anthony “Tony” Soprano – occasionally finds solace looking at churches built by the old stone mason before deciding to rub someone out.
The stone connection failed to take hold with any other part of The Sopranos (Carmela Soprano’s kitchen counters look suspiciously like a plain green laminate), but another stop down the cable lineup does plenty for promoting stone. It’s Home & Garden Television, or HGTV to the savvy viewer, and this one channel may be worth millions of dollars to the natural-stone trade.
For the precious few of you who haven’t tuned in, HGTV offers 20-and-a-half hours of programming daily on (surprise) home and garden topics. Before writing this off as some kind of time-filler for bored homemakers, consider that the audience is generally:
• Upscale, both in personal taste and disposable income;
• Well-versed in home maintenance and remodeling; and
• Very much a mix of the genders, with plenty of men setting the VCR to tape their favorite shows for evening and weekend viewing.
Stone appears ‘round-the-clock on HGTV, popping up on do-it-yourself shows such as Weekend Warriors, as well as regular viewings on Kitchen Design and Bed & Bath Design. The host of the last two shows, Joan Kohn, is a Chicago-based remodeler who’s probably sold more stone this year than any other one person in the country.
Ms. Kohn doesn’t troop exclusively through the Kitchens and Commodes of the Rich and Famous, although she rarely views cheap work. What the viewing audience sees are plenty of examples of how to remodel what they’ve got at home – and stone often plays a large role.
It’s the appeal of stone that comes across the cable and into plenty of living rooms and bedrooms nationwide. Of course, these shows also show plenty of other options – such as solid surface and tile – but, for stone, it’s great exposure to an audience that might not think of granite and marble as a residential surface.
Home-improvement shows aren’t exactly a new phenomenon, as This Old House prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary. However, most of the series of the Bob Vila variety never seemed to take stone seriously – Norm Abram never found a design project that couldn’t use a good piece of ash or oak – even as projects moved from the quick inner-city fixer-upper to a London flat and a Santa Barbara, Calif., bungalow. (The cast-stone veneer and colored concrete at the Santa Barbara job just didn’t cut it, guys, especially when there’s all that natural stone just down the road.)
The appeal of HGTV and shows on other home-style cable networks, such as Discovery’s Home & Leisure Channel, gives stone a better break. Viewers will likely become customers – if we give them a break as well and make stone easy to understand.
If there’s a place to sell natural-stone’s merits instead of ceramic, concrete and solid-surface substrates, it’s on the plethora of home-improvement shows. Some of the corporations involved in synthetic manufacturing see this as essentially free marketing, and jump on the chance to appear on-camera with their wares.
It’s something that organizations such as the Marble Institute of America, along with some of the larger stone importers, need to enhance. It’s an opportunity to sell the merits of stone to the end user, as well as educate the masses on stone selection; given the lack of brand names (or even common names for stone with the same appearance), a chance to reinforce the concept of stone is close to priceless.
Is it time for This Week in Stone? Maybe not, but the extra push on cable TV wouldn’t hurt. And, now that Tony’s been kicked out of the house, maybe he’d like to get back to his roots and push a little stone on the tube himself ….