by David Palmer | Jun 4, 2012 | Business, In the News
When John Doe #1 recently filed suit over John Travolta’s wandering hands in the massage room my immediate reaction was, “Well, there goes the first shoe.”
Sure enough, over the next few weeks other massage practitioners came out of the woodwork testifying to similar experiences and the tabloid press went into overdrive. At last count, the number of accusers was up to five.
In the massage industry this was old news. I heard from practitioners over a decade ago who had Mr. Travolta as a customer and told essentially the same story. With a little bit of discrete asking around as I traveled the country I found out he had a well-deserved reputation of a celebrity to avoid in the massage room as did a number of other high profile, famous folks. Ho hum.
However, the suit did bring to mind the question about the potential fallout of reporting customers who propose illegal activity to massage practitioners. After all, if someone on the street solicited sexual services in exchange for money to an undercover police officer, that person would be arrested.
So what happens if a practitioner reports illegal sexual advances from a customer to the police? I was particularly curious as to whether our two primary professional liability insurance organizations would support the practitioner. So, I put the question to the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) and Associated Massage and Bodywork Professionals (ABMP).
Specifically, I wondered:
- Do they encourage such reporting?
- Does their liability policies support such reporting?
- What if the customer sues the practitioner for defamation?
- Will they defend a member against such a suit?
So, I asked and got prompt responses from both organizations. First, from Ron Precht, Communications Manager of AMTA:
AMTA has always encouraged massage therapists to protect themselves, if they feel they are in danger or feel a client has put them in an unprofessional position. That includes reporting incidents to police, when the massage therapist feels threatened.
The personal injury portion of the AMTA insurance policy states that injury arising out of offenses of libel and slander are covered when committed in the conduct of the enrolled member’s professional services. So, yes, the policy is intended to defend insured members when they are named in lawsuits alleging libel or slander arising from their provision of massage therapy services – such as when reporting a client for illegal sexual advances. Of course, the facts and circumstances of each claim are unique, so coverage can only be assured after evaluation of the specifics of a claim or lawsuit. If it was found that the insured member lied or intentionally disparaged another, coverage would be excluded.
Next, from Les Sweeny, one of the owners of ABMP:
Regarding reporting advances, we are strongly in favor of it; we want our members to act in their own best interests and safety, but to help identify inappropriate behavior. If a customer were to sue a member for slander/defamation, the insurance policy included with membership would cover the cost of defending the member.
So, the upshot is that both the AMTA and ABMP policies contain a “Travolta Clause” protecting their policyholders if they report a misbehaving customer and the customer decides to counter-sue. That is good news. It makes it much easier to be clear with customers who are thinking about crossing the line. And, if you feel threatened in any way, don’t be afraid to call the police.
Let’s just hope that the massage practitioners in the Travolta saga have their policies paid up-to-date.
by David Palmer | Jan 9, 2012 | Business
In the world wide web, “stickiness” refers to how long you can keep a user on your website or how often you can get them to return. It is a measure of user engagement and loyalty.
So how loyal and engaged, that is to say, how sticky are massage customers? Judging by the frequency with which Americans get regular massage, the sad answer would have to be that massage is not very “sticky” at all. [Note: If you want to bypass the calculations and jump to the bottom line numbers, scroll down to the last three paragraphs.]
There are only two professional consumer surveys done for the massage profession. The one commissioned by the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) is annual and the other, sponsored by the Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals (ABMP), is biennial.
While neither of them explicitly states how often American adults get massaged, with a bit of combining and extrapolation of the two surveys, we can arrive at a reasonable approximation.
The most recent ABMP survey reports that, of the number of people who actually got a massage in 2010, their frequency of utilization was as follows:
- 22% had 1 massage
- 22% had 2 massages
- 28% had 3-5 massages
- 6% had 6-10 massages
- 17% had 11-20 massages
- 3% got 21 or more massages
The previous ABMP survey, for 2008, reported these percentages:
- 32% had 1 massage
- 21% had 2 massages
- 35% had 3-5 massages
- 5% had 6-10 massages
- 5% had 11-20 massages
- 2% got 21 or more massages
Now, since both the AMTA and ABMP surveys report the total number of adults getting a massage in a twelve month period, we can use the percentages above to get a range of how many total U.S. adults appear in each frequency category. In the AMTA survey, the total number of adults getting massaged ranges from a high of 24% in 2007 (pre-recession) to their current figure of 18% (between July 2010 and July 2011, unchanged from the prior 12 months). The ABMP figures are strikingly lower. In their latest survey only 16% of US adults got a massage in 2010, up from 14% in 2008.
To chart it out I multiplied the ABMB frequency of utilization percentages by the percentages of people in the U.S. reporting they received a massage in the two time periods surveyed by each organization. Here are the results of each survey by category.
| Frequency of Massages Per Year | AMTA | ABMP |
| 2007/08 – 24% | 2010/11 – 18% | 2008 – 14% | 2010 -16% |
1
Massage | 7.7% | 5.8% | 4.5% | 3.5% |
2
Massages | 5.0% | 3.8% | 2.9% | 3.5% |
3-5
Massages | 8.4% | 6.3% | 1.0% | 4.5% |
6-10
Massages | 1.2% | 0.9% | 0.7% | 1.0% |
11-20
Massages | 1.2% | 0.9% | 0.7% | 2.7% |
21+
Massages | 0.5% | 0.4% | 0.2% | 0.5% |
Hang in there. We are almost to the finish line. While I wish that the ABMP survey had broken out the specific number of people who got 3, 4 or 5 massages in a year, using the data we have, we can sort the frequency into three sub-categories:
- Infrequent users – 1 or 2 massages per year
- Occasional users – 3-5 massages per year
- Regular users – 6 or more massages per year (less than the average number of haircuts per year)
With these definitions and using the best case ABMP figures, we can see that, at the most, only 4.2% of the adult population in the U.S. are regular users of massage. The best case data from the AMTA puts the percentage at 2.9%. Ouch! No wonder the associations do not make it easy to get this number and prefer us to focus on the 16 to 24% who got at least one massage in a year. In another article I make the case that this lack of loyalty and engagement, of “stickiness,” is primarily a result of the high price of massage and discuss what we can do to make massage more affordable and accessible.
One final note: We need to have better data and better analysis of the data we currently have. We can’t make good decisions about our future unless we have good data. The calculations above should have been readily accessible to anyone. The glaring discrepancies in the results between the two surveys should be explainable. The ABMP should be congratulated for the relatively comprehensive and transparent way in which it presents its data compared to the AMTA. However, I would urge both organizations to make all of their raw data from every study they commission available to anyone for analysis. The truth is out there, we are just having a hard time finding it.
