I am really grateful you posted this. Let's see. Samsung acquired Harman in 2017. And Harman owns AKG. AKG in Canada used to be distributed by SC Media and B&J Music, but that fairly recently recently switched to Erikson Consumer, which is owned by JAM Industries. And JAM Industries was recently acquired by DCC, which is huge and has four divisions and 14 billion GBP/year in revenue and is based some time zones away in Dublin, not Canada. I don't understand why you had any difficulty finding someone who knew which way was up and who could help you. How could this be confusing? If you go to the Erikson Consumer site, you will find that under "Divisions" AKG is listed as a brand of the company. But if you click on "Brands," AKG does not appear. Details. Confusion. Customers lost in the woods.
I worked for a relatively small, in the scheme of things, U.S.-based, publicly traded laser manufacturer for a number of years. Our business was viciously competitive. We made fantastic technology, in my opinion, if I do say so myself, and that certainly sold a lot of lasers and lights. But what really put us over the top I think was our commitment to insane customer service. Customers all over the world had direct phone numbers and email addresses for most of senior management, service people, and nearly all of our MD consultants. Don't worry, everybody got paid, everybody got stock. What we found was, if you give out all your contact info freely and make everyone accessible, the customers almost never use it. But when they do, it is usually for a very good reason. At least that was what we experienced. Of course, we weren't the size of Toyota, we were fairly small. But we made it work. The customers loved it.
Right before I hung it up, a merger proposal appeared. It would have created the largest company in our business by a long shot. We and the board talked about it and carefully considered it. Ultimately , we decided to take a zero and remain independent. We left a bunch of money on the table. But the thing that really put that choice over the top was our fear and belief that this special relationship and reputation we had built with our customer base would be ruined by virtue of the sheer size of the new company. So we said no. We would stay small. Build great gear, take care of our customers, and still make plenty of money.
There was something I was taught during my training years by a wise elder. He said: "You know what the enemy of good is? The enemy of good is better."
Bigger isn't always better in business. Not for the customer. That is my belief. Senior management, the board, and shareholders may benefit greatly financially from a big M&A event, but often, the customers are left to fend for themselves. And we just were not going to do that to the people who had made us so successful.
So, I am glad you finally got someone to help you . But the fact is, they should have never made it so difficult for you to do so. These are multi-billion-dollar organizations now. They should have their act together. They should know what companies they have relationships with and what those relationships are. Who do we rep? Whos's our service guy or gal now? what about parts requests--are those the same now, or are we doing something else? There should've been piles of meetings and memos and emails and vmails and texts explaining all this in minute detail. Phone numbers. Email addresses. website links and contact info. Updating the "About Us" and "History" and "Support" parts of these websites must be done immediately. Anything less is just plain laziness. Put a whole freaking team on it for a week. Who cares? It's worth it and you can afford it. Take some freaking pride, people. It's embarrassing. And a good lesson in how not to "integrate" after a series of acquisitions. Details. It's always the details. And somebody didn't care enough to mind those details.
