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Re: [RC] AHA Marketing Materials - Lif Strand

At 09:03 PM 6/18/2004, Kristen A Fisher wrote:
Here are some of the latest breed promotion materials developed over the past year or so by AHA.

Absolutely no offense meant, Kristen - but is this program working? Maybe it is. Maybe new Arabian registrations are increasing and new owners are increasing and I've heard wrong. That's not what Equus Magazine has been reporting for the past few years. Maybe I'm simply impatient and things will turn around in another ten or twenty years.


If I had a say in AHA's future (which I've tried before and got nowhere with) I'd be focusing on public education, and I'd be putting AHA money where it wants to go in the future, which would hopefully include distance riding as a premier use of Arabian horses. If AHA sees other areas than shows being how Arabians are used, then let's see tons of support for those other efforts - less in marketing materials and more in *supporting* these efforts. Let's see real incentives that are based on something other than the show world model.

I can tell you this, though - even show people are hungry for something other than showing. In the late 1990s, I hosted a trade show booth for AERC at Scottsdale. We had AERC brochures, and we showed the same tape of Tevis riders going over Cougar Rock over and over until I thought I could see it in my sleep, AERC T-shirts to sell and aside from that we had nothing else because it was all we could do at that point. Now here we were at a big mucky muck horse show and here I was thinking we're maybe in the wrong place, that people would maybe put us down, but instead we had people coming over to us thanking us for offering an alternative to showing, not slack jawed in disbelief, but with wonder and a sense of excitement that Cougar Rock/Tevis/Endurance/Distance Riding could be something you could do with an Arabian horse. We had an incredibly positive response, and we had some Big Name Breeders come over and "confess" to having ridden endurance in the past - that was fun to learn about.

I guess where I'm going with this is that we had to do that booth on a shoestring, surrounded by all that money and glitz, but don't think I didn't notice that AHA (then AHR) had a nice, expensive booth and lots of promo materials, as if the majority of endurance horses weren't Arabians but some other alien breed from another planet and the ugly stepchildren to boot - when in fact AERC, as the sanctioning organization for endurance, should be right next to the Arabian Jockey Club in the AHA booth at every show that AHA has a presence, every place AHA goes to promote the breed. AHA should be sending support materials for *Arabian endurance horses* to endurance rides, not general "versatility" brochures which no one cares about because it implies good at everything, master of nothing. Who wants a horse that even the breed registry doesn't say is best at anything but being pretty?

Well I'll step off my soapbox now, as I'm sure I've offended half the people on this list plus anyone who might be reading any of this at AHA. Sorry if I have given offense, but every time this subject comes up, my frustration level is higher than the last time. It's been building for a long time.




________________________________ Lif Strand fasterhorses.com Quemado NM USA

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Replies
[RC] AHA Marketing Materials, Kristen A Fisher