Consulting Firms Advise Businesses on Accessing the People-With-Disabilities Market
By Mark Richards and Laurel Richards, ILRU Program
Entrepreneurs have noted that the secret to establishing a successful business is to identify a niche, a needed service, and adeptly filling that niche.
A recent New York Times article describes two U.S.-based companies run by people with personal experience with disabilities. The niche being filled by these companies is advising businesses on the advantages of attracting as customers people with disabilities.
Note that while these consulting firms are in the United States, the business concept of selling companies on seeing people with disabilities as valuable customers with disposable incomes has international application.
Carmen Jones, president of Solutions Marketing Group in the Washington, D.C. area, tells New York Times reporter Martin Krossel that "companies need to tell consumers with disabilities that they are valued consumers, that they are not an inconvenience, that they will have ease in accessing services, and where there is staff, it will be skilled in addressing their needs."
Jones' company is a marketing consulting firm which provides businesses with marketing strategies that target consumers with disabilities. Such strategies include the how-to's of modifying existing products and services, building relationships with organizations in the disability community, and creating promotional campaigns that target consumers with disabilities
Bill and Cheryl Duke and son, Paul, established W. C. Duke Associates, Inc., by providing training to service-industries employees in disability etiquette such as interacting with people with different kinds of disabilities, describing the arrangement of items on a table for a person who has limited sight, overcoming initial intimidation in dealing with people who appear to be different, avoiding offending by offering too much help, and learning not to associate the disability with illness or incompetence.
The Dukes try to show businesses how to make the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) profitable by assisting clients to comply with the human side of ADA and to realize the importance of customer service training in disability issues as the keys to unlocking a large, lucrative, and loyal market.
In Krossel's article, "Selling to the Disabled Can Mean More Than Ads," he describes the goals of these two different business "to benefit their business clients as much as serving the cause of people with disabilities."
Without question, many businesses contact Jones and the Dukes out of fear of not complying with ADA; however threat of lawsuit is not the only motivation for companies to contact these consulting companies, Krossel reports. "There is a longer-run strategy at work. The incidence of disability cuts across all socioeconomic groups, and many people with disabilities are supported by their families and have sizable disposable incomes.
"Furthermore, with the aging of the population, more people who have had successful careers are acquiring disabilities later in life, when they have accumulated enough wealth to become heavy users of products and servers designed for people with disabilities."
Supporting this assertion is a selling point the Dukes give on their Web site, that disabled people have an annual disposable income worth more than $188 billion, according to the 1992 U.S. Census--an indisputably profitable market. Also citing the '92 Census, Jones observes on her Web site that in 1995, people with disabilities spent $81.7 billion on travel alone.
Jones and the Dukes believe that having a disability themselves gives them additional credibility as consultants. People with disabilities, they say, are the "experts" because they know what it is like to encounter barriers.
For more information on Solutions Marketing Group, visit its web site at http://www.disability-marketing.com/welcome.php4, on WC Dukes Associates, Inc. at http://www.wcduke.com/, or search The New York Times Web site (which requires one to register but does not charge a fee) at http://www.nytimes.com.
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