Purchasing contact lenses used to be a closed market. Lens manufacturers would sell them only to eyecare professionals with little or no price competition. Eye doctors would then mark up the price and sell them to consumers. Everybody won, except the consumer.
Jonathan Coon and John Nichols wanted to change all that. While students at Brigham Young University, they founded a small business selling contact lenses to other students. They named the company 1-800 CONTACTS and the business grew rapidly, going public three years later on NASDAQ.
Resistance Leads to Legislation
The closed market for contact lenses became an increasing roadblock to growing 1-800 CONTACTS. Eyecare professionals sought to maintain the status quo by refusing to provide patients’ contacts lens prescriptions to them unless they purchased their lenses from the professional. To address this, the company, along with others, lobbied the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to open the market to competition. As a result, Congress passed the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumer Act (FCLCA), which in part requires eyecare professionals to provide contact lens prescriptions to their patients, whether the patient asks for it or not, known as “prescription portability.”
Lens manufacturers and eyecare professionals, represented by the American Optometric Association (AOA), resisted the FCLCA in both obvious and subtle ways. The statute required online retailers such as 1-800 CONTACTS to verify a prescription prior to filling it. Professionals obstructed the process by simply not replying to 1-800 CONTACTS’s requests. This was an obvious form of resistance. In addition, rumors began to circulate that online retailers were selling either counterfeit or grey market lenses (lenses purchased through a distributor versus directly from the manufacturer, which is illegal).
plus pages of content created to support 1-800 CONTACTS activities
plus articles earned
%
plus storyjacking success rate
1-800 CONTACTS Goes on Offense
1-800 CONTACTS engaged with UPRAISE to develop both defensive and offensive strategies to address this situation. We recommend the following strategies:
- Build a strong, united coalition with other distributors, public policy groups, state attorneys general, state and federal legislators and other government bodies,
- Re-emphasize a long history of collusion and monopolistic practices within the contact lens industry,
- Identify and engage with respected opinion leaders to speak/discuss the issues and appear at legislative hearings, author op-ed article and participate in media interviews,
- Identify and engage with supportive eyecare professionals,
- Demonstrate that government intervention is appropriate in monopolistic situations and compatible with open markets.
UPRAISE worked closely with 1-800 CONTACTS’s marketing, legal and legislative affairs teams to support this strategy. We:
- Created a detailed information kit for media, legislators and other influencers outlining our key messages and quantifying them whenever possible. This included backgrounders on 1-800, FCLCA, key issues related to the contact lens market, bios of 1-800 and supporting spokespeople and more, maintained on a Google Drive for easy access by all 1-800 teams,
- 1-800 teams utilized this content to build its coalition with distributors, public policy groups, supportive eyecare professionals and other critical audiences,
- Developed issues management plans for the federal level and eight hot button states where legislative or other regulatory activity was likely to occur
- Having these plans in place enabled UPRAISE and 1-800 teams to move quickly when activity took place.
- Began a proactive media and social media campaign to communicate 1-800 key messages and appropriately refute manufacturer and AOA arguments against a competitive contact lens market.
- UPRAISE drafted and distributed a new themed media outreach monthly, managed interviews and organized resulting media coverage,
- We made available a wide range of subject experts to accelerate and simplify the research process for reporters,
- We provided stats and quotes pages, videos and supporting content,
- We forwarded resulting coverage to 1-800’s marketing, legal and legislative affairs teams to support their activities.
- Storyjacked announcements that contradicted 1-800 key messages and/or contained in accurate information.
- Some professed that a competitive market was “unsafe” for consumers, for example,
- Reviewed media monitoring multiple times per day,
- Drafted responses and secured 1-800 CONTACTS‘s approval immediately,
- Pushed out our messages, organized briefings and collected resulting coverage.
The Results Were Clear
This campaign lasted approximately two years, after which it was clear that legislators and regulators at the federal level and in most states recognized the value of a competitive contact lens market. UPRAISE’s contribution to this success included:
- Creating more than 450 pages of information, photos, stats, graphics and related information to support the entire 1-800 team’s activities,
- Securing more than 600 articles with an average score of 4.6 on the UPRAISE measurement scale of -5 to +5, which the 1-800 teams frequently included in their outreach to important audiences
- A storyjacking success rate of more than 40% of having our messages included in articles resulting from outreach from groups opposed to an open contact lens market.
Aggressive, creative strategies executed effectively and collaboratively earned a victory for consumer choice.
Vice President, Marketing, 1-800 CONTACTS
