Aaron P. Jagdfeld - Generac Holdings, Inc.
Management
Yeah, it's interesting, the spillover effect you get. We saw improved activations in every region. And so, it was really interesting. The Northeast has been, as we called out, up until I think maybe the second quarter of this year, I think the Northeast we found a bottom there, finally in terms of year-over-year comps – quarter-over-quarter comps, even the Northeast. And we saw the stabilization of that in Q2, and then we saw it grow again in Q3. So, that was nice really across all markets. And so, the impact that we've gotten, the category awareness is one that I'll just kind of focus on here for a second, the home standby product category. When we wind the clock back and this is something that we metric every couple of years we go out and we do a bunch of marketing research around the category, just to make sure that we're understanding kind of how it's trading, where it's going. Category awareness is a big one that we look at, and you can go back 10 years ago and category awareness for home standbys was 30% of people that were aware that the product even existed that an automatic solution hooked up to your home's fuel supply and electric supply could be something you could have. Today, our latest survey which was done earlier this year, actually before these major events, it's 72% category awareness. So, we look at that and we say well, that's tremendous. Now, obviously major events like Sandy, this event like Irma is going to have a positive impact and have had positive impacts on awareness. It's also had a major impact on the brand. I mean the amount of coverage that we get from a PR standpoint, as well as our paid advertising that we do, kind of post outage, has really raised the profile of the Generac brand, especially around this category. In fact, in many cases you can go into regions of the country, where the brand has become interchangeable, it's become synonymous with the category. A lot of times customers refer to the product as a Generac. They won't call it a home standby, they'll call it a Generac, and sometimes that's – even if it's not our brand, we'll get – our dealers have anecdotally given us, examples where customers call to look for a repair or service on a Generac, and they get there, and it's a different brand. So, I mean it's interesting to see how – and I think, that's really a testament to the amount of effort that we put into creating category awareness and the amount of effort we put into building the brand, and I think, it's really paying off very, very well for us in a lot of cases here.