Thanks for your kind words which I've snipped from your quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by sleeplessness
I've been the the advertising and marketing end of business for thirty years ....
When you see an ad for Porsche, Audi, or even Mercedes Benz lately and they are showcasing one of their cars used solely for racing do you write them or think "what bs, I can't get one of those..." ..
Come on kids, this is much more interesting than describing last years' model...I for one want to know where I am going, not where I have been...I've adheared (haha) to this philosophy with my clients for years...
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We use our Max line as our "racing team." The precursor launch of information on our Desktop Audio System is motivated somewhat differently.
Almost always, when a new product is released, you get a little burst of sales, which soon drops down to a base-line level that reflects the nominal market demand for the product. This little burst up front is due to "pent up demand." Most times, a new product is based on improvements of an existing product, either one of your own or a competitors. The pent up demand bump comes from people familiar with existing products and the perceived deficiencies of them. When a new product appears that satisfies the deficiencies, there is a pool of people who are already aware of the problem and recognize the new solution and buy immediately. That's the pent up demand bump. After they've all bought (or decided not to) the remaining demand represents the rate at which people come to discover and appreciate the new product. That's the normal primary job of marketing, to identify and project the values of a product to a broad market.
Now the problem is that we're sometimes so innovative that when we produce a completely new kind of product, there is no pre-existing pent-up demand. When it first appears, people say, "What the heck is that?" For example, our BlockHead, first commercially available balanced headphone amp. With that product we experienced no "pent-up demand" bump, because there is no pent up demand if someone is completely unaware that a balanced headphone amp could or should exist.
Now, this pent-up demand bump is very important for the maker. Let me give you just one of many reasons. When we build our Power Amp, we will have to buy the ICE modules in minimum lots of 50. Which means we have to increase how much inventory we carry by a significant amount. That increase in inventory can only come from prior profit. Profit dollars are very dear and hard to come by. We really can't be without them for too long. But if we can create a pent-up demand, and if we can order the modules to arrive here just before we start to sell them, we might be able to sell off the fifty ICE modules before we have to pay for them, and have the profit left over to pay for the next round of modules. In other words, if you can create a pent up demand, you make the inventory new product sale at least partially pay for the increase in inventory and make introducing a new product a little less painful.
Now, in the case of the Desktop Audiophile System, we have a relatively new type of product---there's really nothing quite like it to my knowledge. But there are things like it in the sense that it's simply a miniature stereo on your desk. And there's also now a category of bookshelf stereos in small packages, but they really aren't marketed as a desktop solution. The desktop solution peole have in their head is computer speakers basically. What we're trying to do with this series of ads is to provide a little paradigm shift for folks so that the understand the a miniature stereo for there desk is possible and what it's benefits might be early enough for them to internally assign the value of it for themselves. Some folks will desire it enough to buy. And then, when it's released, we'll get that lovely pent up demand bump that we usually enjoy when we improve existing products.