WORDS FROM THE EDITOR

This is our marketing issue, and some of the tools in it are new. Weinor Australia’s WeinorVision uses mixed reality to stand a true-to-scale awning or patio roof in the customer’s own outdoor space during the consultation. Somfy placed advertising in SBS’s FIFA World Cup coverage this year. And Tyler Nicholls of Betta Blinds prices video two ways: an agency at $2,000 to $5,000-plus, or 20 hours of staff time a month plus a microphone, a tripod and a phone adapter that cost $385 between them (see page 52).

The tools will change again. What sits underneath them will not. “If you’re in sales you might not know it but you’ve been telling stories for years,” Nicholls says. You learn what problem the customer is trying to solve, then you tell them about the customer you solved it for. A camera lets you tell that story more than once.

This issue carries the obituaries of two men who were selling long before anyone filmed an install on a phone. Ray Chatterton passed away on 26 September. Joe Turner passed away peacefully at home, aged 80.

Joe told Tony Cassar in an Ask the Expert interview for this magazine in 2019 that “one thing I always wanted to do was selling”. He answered a Luxaflex newspaper advertisement in 1965, was told he was too young to be a salesman and was made an installer. Given the hardest sales area in Brisbane, he went on to win salesman of the year for 12 years. Along the way he completed a marketing degree. He left Luxaflex to become general manager of an advertising agency, and in 1986 he and his wife, Lynne, started Image Blinds in Brisbane.

Ray started as a sales representative for South Pacific Blinds and went on to establish Creative Blinds and Awnings and, in 2004, Orion Blinds. He and Joe were two of the five life members of Fashionline, the group that pooled its funds to produce brochures and magazines when printing was cost-prohibitive for the average independent business owner. “But as a group, there were enough people contributing to make sure we got the best bang for our buck,” Ray said in our July 2020 cover story on the group. Joe, in the same story: “We even could afford a colour logo for Fashionline.”

A colour logo then, a World Cup placement now. The budget changes. The instinct does not.

Joe was president of the industry’s national association from May 2000 until 2019. He used his closing remarks in that 2019 interview to thank me for this magazine, saying of the association that “without your magazine, I don’t think we would have as much success as what we’re having today”.

It was a generous thing to say, and it had the debt the wrong way round. A trade magazine is worth only what the people in the trade are prepared to tell it, and Joe and Ray told us plenty. Our condolences go to Lynne and the Turner family, and to Matthew, Natalie and the Chatterton family.

JAMES BOSTON
Editor & Publisher