Grow Boating assessments fully restored
Following a recommendation from the Grow Boating Funding Task Force to the board of the National Marine Manufacturers Association, assessments for Grow Boating will be fully restored, effective Jan 1. The assessments had been temporarily reduced by 85 percent this past July as a new marketing strategy and analysis of the impact of the recession on consumers was developed.
In a press release this week, Thom Dammrich, president of Grow Boating, Inc. and NMMA, said the decision to restore assessments “reaffirms the industry’s commitment to a national integrated marketing campaign and the importance of a unified effort to grow the market for boating.”
In August, the Grow Boating Board of Directors selected Minneapolis-based marketing firm OLSON as agency-of-record to aid in the development and execution of a new integrated marketing campaign.
The restored assessments are projected to collect $4.5 million by the end of 2011 to fund the campaign.
To date, the Discover Boating campaign has generated more than 190,000 prospects, with 19,276 of those having purchased a boat, and more than 500,000 direct referrals from DiscoverBoating.com to boat manufacturer websites, according to the Grow Boating release.
It is also estimated that 14,000 boats have been sold to first-time boat owners since the start of the campaign.
What are your thoughts about the restoration of assessments? Drop us a line and let us know what you think.
Click here to read the full press release from Grow Boating.
Grow Boating is nothing more than another tax in my opinion. It has no value and should be scrapped for once and for all.
NMMA really has their hands full after the misappropriation of funds after the initiative was put on hold. The funds were supposed to be transferred back to the dealers but many manufacturers (namely: the big one in the industry) kept the money to line their own pockets. Without some sort of dealer input or say in how much is spent, how much is collected, and what it is spent on (for example, I believe 15% of funds go to the dealer certification program whether you are a certified dealer or not) then the dealers are going to look at it like “taxation without representation” and will not support the program – figuratively or financially.