Northeast Region Reaches Out to General Contractors

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For many years promotion of concrete parking lots has been focused on architects and engineers. This made perfect sense since they were the one’s specifying the pavement; who better to reach out to than the design community. Owners also were a regular target for concrete promotional activity. However, promoters in the Northeast have recently realized that there is another segment of influencers that play an important role in the use or non-use of ready mixed concrete for parking lots and that’s the general contractors (GC) who bid these projects for national retail chains such as Walmart, Lowe's, Home Depot and CVS just to name a few.

NRMCA’s Senior Director, National Resources, Doug O’Neill reported recently that these influencers have been largely ignored by our traditional promotional efforts even though a GC bidding a project who has never done or is unfamiliar with concrete parking lots tends to take the "we don’t do that here" approach and either does not offer the owner a number for concrete or if he or she does, it’s significantly inflated because of the "un-known".....

"What we’ve identified here is that we’ve got to do a much better job communicating to companies that could hold the key to moving our efforts forward, and that’s the GC’s," O’Neill said. 

Working closely with the state associations in the region, there are plans underway to actively target the GC’s bidding work in the Northeast with a renewed emphasis on educating them on the advantages of concrete both to the owner and also to themselves. "They’ve got to understand that concrete parking lots are being installed regularly in most areas of this country, successfully and competitively," O'Neill added.

Too Expensive, can’t handle our winters and cracks uncontrollably are the three most common misperceptions about concrete that the newly defined efforts will aim to address. O’Neill concluded by saying "our members also need to have that same belief that concrete CAN BE DONE HERE!"

For more information on how you can start promoting concrete parking lots, contact Doug O'Neill at doneill@nrmca.org.