Rossmoor Contributions

ANDRIANA MENDEZ IS FEATURED IN ROSSMOOR NEWS AS CONTRIBUTOR TO REBRAND

October 16, 2024 –

Marketing effort focuses on identifying Rossmoor’s vision and target audience, and guest speaker Andriana Mendez, right, the co-owner of Custom Moving and Hauling, gives a presentation to members of the Marketing Committee last week, including Fellow Pranjali Vadlaputi, left, of UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. News photo by Javier Roman

Article originally published here at Rossmoor News
Written by Sam Richards, Staff writer

To properly market Rossmoor, GRF leaders will have to figure out exactly what they want it to be, and then decide whom they want to sell it to.

At the second meeting of the GRF Marketing Task Force on Oct. 8, the group set about those jobs, forming two “working groups” of three people each – the “mission/vision/ values” group to discuss what Rossmoor is and what it should strive to become, and the “target audience” group, to determine Rossmoor’s best prospective audience.

Both groups plan to reveal their findings at the next Marketing Task Force meeting, on Tuesday, Nov. 12.

At its Oct. 8 meeting, Andriana Mendez, a seniors’ workshop leader and co-owner of Custom Moving & Hauling, which does business in Rossmoor, suggested it is important to identify “Rossmoor 2.0,” a more defined future version of Rossmoor. Task Force Chairman Dwight Walker responded that a less comprehensive “brand refresh” of what could one day be called “Rossmoor Walnut Creek” may be more appropriate than a more comprehensive (and more drastic) overhaul.

With almost all purchases of homes in Rossmoor limited to cash-only buyers, task force members said, Rossmoor may be looking at a future of marketing to an increasingly wealthy demographic.

The task force also took a brief look at some of Rossmoor Walnut Creek’s main “competitors” in the active senior communities field in California, ranging from “active senior” developments similar to Rossmoor (Laguna Woods Village in Southern California, The Villages in San Jose, others) to more comprehensive developments like the planned Glen at Heather Farm in Walnut Creek, which in addition to providing homes for active seniors would offer direct connections to other services such as assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing.

Knowing that competition, and what other senior communities’ potential buyers are considering, task force members said, should inform both the “mission” (why something exists) and the “vision” (where an organization works to move in the future) pieces of what Rossmoor should be – and how it should present itself to the world, as well as potential buyers.

That presentation is the “branding” element, and Walker said that before work on branding can fully proceed, that a mission/vision statement needs to be developed, and a target audience for Rossmoor must be identified.

He said the two working groups should come to the task force’s next meeting, on Tuesday, Nov. 12, with tentative mission statements and target audiences in mind.

The brand, Mendez said, “is something that everyone needs to be on the same page about, and then everything else will fall into place after that.”

And some, including Marketing Task Force member Linda Register, said Rossmoor’s brand needs to be less confusing. “Rossmoor,” “Golden Rain Foundation” and various individual Mutuals identifiers, she said, can cloud the issue for newbies. “It’s just too much for people to comprehend,” Register said.

Protecting that brand is critical, Mendez said. To that end, Rossmoor officials need both to scour its “touchpoints to the public” (think GRF websites, digital and print advertising, blogs, the Rossmoor News, etc.) and check internal communications like Rossmoor club websites for possible confusion or dilution of that brand.

Ann Peterson, Rossmoor’s director of communications and GRF staff liaison to this committee, said what Rossmoor decides to message is the message that will be delivered via those public touchpoints. “What (the task force) does here will determine how we move forward,” she said.

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