Is it what you leave in, or what you take out?
To introduce a new category of building products, LKM helped Georgia-Pacific take the architect community by storm at the 2007 national American Institute of Architecture conference. Entertaining and service-providing street tactics drove show attendees to GP’s tradeshow booth and created big buzz surrounding “Building Paperless” – a new idea in sustainable building.
But supplanting the Build Paperless terminology into this group of decision makers was just the first step. In 2008, Build Paperless is sprouting legs.
The first step was to meet architects back at the one event that brings the globally minded group together. At the 2008 AIA show, Build Paperless came indoors. While product sales and education were exchanged by most vendors on the expo floor, Georgia-Pacific hosted a Jenga® tournament on the educational floor. Even after weeks of interviews and quantitative research evaluation our first year reaching architects, being among them in 2007 taught us a great deal. We learned architects attend the conference primarily to take classes for certifications. So, in between classes (and some times even in place of classes) architects took time to engage in a little Build Paperless fun. But this time our entertainment was placed in the context of building science topics to help solidify the idea of taking paper out of certain building materials as a new concept in building.
While architects plotted mathematical approaches and steadied hands to build the tallest Jenga towers, they were surrounded by questions like, “Is it what you leave in or what you take out?” and “Today: moisture management. Tomorrow: moisture forgiveness.” And if they wanted to hear more about how Building Paperless related to these philosophical issues, we asked them to visit BuildPaperless.com, where they could even sign up to receive periodic e-blasts on these conversations and related project case histories.
More than 70 teams of architects took the Build Paperless Jenga challenge. Hundreds of spectators cheered them on, took pictures and stopped by to check scores. See, we realized, to build relationships with architects, you can’t forget about the building part. So block by block, we spent time with them, asked them for their e-mail addresses and asked them what they thought about long-term impacts of removing paper from interior wall products.
From here, who knows what we can build together?
