[RCBinTN]

Way nicer than my former company sites. All they have is vending machines and crappy (free) coffee. You rock, Tom.

 

[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

I always gave a dinner party where most of them learned to cook some professional sides together with a colleague cooking adepts.
It creates a reasonable safe place to try out new stuf and learn to make that together.
I always was Chef Cook.
We had 10x10m as kitchen. 100m2 which is a nice place for a little brigade to make nice things.

Anyone on this two (Mike and Jason's thread) when passing my city with good intentions is welcome to come and eat with me.
Just let me know a few days in advance.

 

[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

Anyone on this two (Mike and Jason's thread) when passing my city with good intentions is welcome to come and eat with me.
Just let me know a few days in advance.

 

[Paladin79]

Way nicer than my former company sites. All they have is vending machines and crappy (free) coffee. You rock, Tom.

A few of them paid attention as I built the Coaster amps but some of them will probably scratch their heads at first when they see them.

 

[wink]

Get a pet cat.........

 

[Rowethren]

I seriously wish I was employed by some of you... We have to fight to get anything nice, getting Christmas presents, ha, good luck with that. They were even talking about cancelling the Christmas drinks! This is despite being told in a meeting 2 weeks ago that we had increased revenue by 15% (the rest of the meeting was a passive aggressive rant about how salary cost the company too much and they didn't think we worked hard enough).

I love my job...

This sums up my company perfectly (one of my favourite memes)

 

[wink]

 

[RCBinTN]

This is despite being told in a meeting 2 weeks ago that we had increased revenue by 15% (the rest of the meeting was a passive aggressive rant about how salary cost the company too much and they didn't think we worked hard enough).

Wow, talk about the art of demotivating a workforce!

 

[ScubaMan2017]

Everybody is busy buying Schiit gear on-line today .. cyber Monday.

With my EITR, I’ve reached the zenith of my set up. Now, to pay off the IOU I have with my household.

This may help add to a discussion, I am looking for stocking stuffers for employees, I am already giving each of them a set of Schiit Coaster boards. There are always candles, socks, gloves, and chocolates. This year I will give tiny bottles of booze, bourbon lip balm, Satsuma mandarin oranges, Zwilling double walled glasses, but I am open to ideas. I like to add new items each year but nothing real expensive. (several items $10 or less.) Ideas?

We have a company here called, Lee Valley Tools. They stock a variety of “things”. With your favourable US/CDN dollar exchange, it can satisfy your $10 limit. They’re a class-act. Here’s their link...

 

[Jason Stoddard]

2018, Chapter 12:
The Marketing Slur


Yes, The Marketing Slur.

You’ve heard it. You may have even used it.

You know: “Oh, they’re just a marketing company.”

Or, to expand, “They’re all flash and no substance, selling to lemmings with no ability to discern a fine product from a shiny pile. There’s no technology there, just fancy design. They spend all their money on ads and none on R&D. If you didn’t see them at Sharper Image, they’d never sell any. If they weren’t cruising on the legacy of (insert rockstar CEO name here), they wouldn’t be anywhere.”

Sounding a bit more familiar now?

The Marketing Slur is an all-purpose insult with a broad range of uses.

• Carmakers that make things a bit too out of reach? Ah, there’s no real substance there, it’s all just marketing to fool the undiscerning nouveau riche.
• A technology company with a closed-garden model? Yeah, well, everyone who buys that stuff are lemmings, led along by the nose by fancy marketing.
• An audio company that has different goals than Your One And True Personal Audio Truths? Again, it’s just that eeevil marketing, twisting the simple minds of the masses.

Lately, more and more, I’ve heard The Marketing Slur applied to Schiit.

Yes, Schiit.

“Oh yeah, they’re just a marketing company.”

“I don’t see where they spend the money, it must be just marketing.”

“Blind fanboys are the only reason Schiit exists, their marketing is really good if you’re not very bright.”

Aside: Now, none of these are actual quotes; I’m paraphrasing. But I’ve heard all of these comments, with increasing frequency, over the last year or so. You get the picture.​

And, you know what? I get it.

I used to have my own marketing company, so Schiit must be marketing-driven, right?

Schiit has silly, catchy names, so marketing must be all they think about, right?

Schiit products at least try to look good, so it must be all about the marketing, right?

Well, there’s a few inconvenient facts that get in the way of us being a marketing company. But I’ll get to those later. Instead, I’ll start with my own use of The Marketing Slur…and the trip that opened my eyes.


Jason Gets His Ass Handed to Him

I’ll admit it. Before I went to speak on virtual worlds at Harvard (this is not a joke—hell, there was an MIT Tech Review article on what we did: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/409682/historical-maps-in-second-life/), I freely talked Schiit about Bose.

Bose was clearly just a marketing company, targeting the lowest common denominator, not at all interested in sound.

Duh.

Everyone knew that.

But, after Harvard, I had a chance to go out and visit Bose on The Mountain…specifically their R&D labs. I signed an NDA, so 10 years later I’m still not comfortable saying exactly what I heard and saw, but suffice to say, Bose is NOT just a marketing company. A couple of the most impressive demos I’ve heard (and seen) to date blew that idea out of the water. I had to completely reset my notions of what the company was about after that visit.

Now, I’m not sure how much of Bose’s R&D makes it into their consumer products. I’m betting it’s a reasonable amount, but by no means all of it. I still haven’t seen some of the stuff I saw long ago in any of their products, but I also don’t follow their stuff in great detail.

So why don’t I follow what Bose is doing in detail? It’s simple. I’m not all that interested in a lot of the stuff I saw, because the applications are less tweaky high-end and more consumer-oriented.

And that underscores the important point: just because I’m not interested in their goals doesn’t mean they’re not a technology company striving to do some extremely cutting-edge stuff.

And, just because they don’t make stuff specifically targeted at me doesn’t mean they’re “just a marketing company.”

Stop. Go back and read those two previous italicized paragraphs.

And let that sink in a bit.

“Yeah, yeah, and Bose is still a marketing company,” someone says. “They spend a ton of money on ads, I see them everywhere.”

Hmm, really? Let’s look at that.

Getting figures for Bose, a private company, is not as surefire as with a public company, but if we go by their stated size of $3.8B (yes, that’s BILLION) in gross revenue in 2017, and various blatherings by AdWeek that state their advertising spend as $36MM, $150MM, or $208MM (yes, the range is that wide, probably due to Bose keeping their cards close, and different definition of “total.")

So, depending on how you slice it, Bose spends somewhere between 1% and 5% of their gross revenue on advertising.

Aside: 5% is more believable. They are everywhere.​

But, even 5% is substantially less than the average spend by CPG (that’s consumer packaged goods) companies, which the Wall Street Journal has pegged at 24%.

Yes, twenty-four percent.

Yes, as in nearly a QUARTER of GROSS revenue.

Yes, AVERAGE.

Let that sink in.

Aside: And yeah, I’m comparing advertising spend vs total marketing budget, but if it takes Bose a billion dollars to manage a $200MM ad spend, they’re doing something very, very wrong.​

So is Bose a marketing company? Not by CPG metrics. They’re spending well below average for their revenue, and they have significant investment in R&D.

Is Bose good at advertising their products? Yes, absolutely. They are very good at getting their message out where it is effective at reaching their target audience. They are good at communicating their benefits, and differentiating from the competition.

Now, their products may not be what you want. That’s perfectly fine. But that does not make them a marketing company, nor deserving of The Marketing Slur.

And that’s something that even I had to learn.


No Audio Company is a Marketing Company…

Here’s the reality: no audio company is a marketing company.

Seriously. I’ve written about this before. The budgets needed to keep a marketing-driven company afloat will give even the largest audio players serious pause. Bose’s entire spend, across their broad product line, isn’t much bigger than what a car company spends in 3 months to launch a single car—on antiquated broadcast media alone!

Again, stop. Go back. Read that again: a car company might spend all of Bose’s ad budget in 3 months, on TV, on a single model.

And that doesn’t get into online media, print media, outdoor, in-store, and a dozen other kinds of advertising.

Nor does it get into sales promotions, spiffs, dealer incentives, and other types of channel marketing.

Nor does it go into the much more advanced stuff you can do these days, like advertising retargeting, dynamic sales page building, AI product recommendations, abandoned cart reconversion, and a half-dozen more highly measured and optimized approaches.

Nor does it differentiate marketing from advertising, branding, or sales. Because marketing is a catch-all. It’s a lazy phrase that encompasses advertising and branding, which are specific, and may even be conflated with sales, which is another catch-all that sometimes slops over into the marketing realm and vice-versa.

Like I said, I’ve written about this before. Check out the following chapters on marketing:

Chapter 2: 15 Years On the Marketing Front Lines
2016, Chapter 1: A Longer Discourse on Marketing
2017, Chapter 3: Leaving Marketing​

Hell, Chapter 2 pretty much sums it up. It stands up well, even today. Because I know you’re not keen on clicking back and forth between a bunch of links, I’ll include some of it here:

Condensed Marketing Stuff Follows

1. Most companies are too terrified to be effective at marketing. Show them something amazing, something catchy, something incredibly effective, and the first reaction (at most clients) is, “Wow, this is wonderful, let’s do it!” Then, two days later, an email appears. It usually goes like this: “Our CEO/lawyers/accountant/design intern/marketing director’s daughter/fish/dog looked at it and we’re concerned that it may be too ‘out there…” Yep. Done. Key takeaway: Don’t be scared to stand out.

2. This terror can affect everything they do, so they may not be effective at anything. The second-guessing of great ideas doesn’t stop at marketing. It usually extends all across the organization, to product development and customer service. That’s why you get so many me-to products and crap customer service. “But our competition is doing it,” whines the product manager. “But the competition doesn’t provide any better support,” says the director of customer service. Key takeaway: A race to the bottom helps nobody. Don’t benchmark yourself into mediocrity.

3. Most companies have no idea what to do in marketing. “Let’s do social, I heard it’s cheap and easy,” or, “I’m tired of the website, let’s change it,” or, “Well, all of our competitors are going to that show, so we need to be there,” or, “I know the magazines are getting less and less effective every year, but I think we need to be in the books,” is the rule of the day. Key takeaway: marketing should be a portfolio strategy, with the most money going to the most effective and measurable tactics, with detailed analytics on what is working and what isn’t. If marketing doesn’t make money, it shouldn’t be done. Period.

Why is it important:

1. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death…no, wait, that’s from Dune. But it’s true. Second-guessing your first reaction to something you love usually doesn’t result in great things. Trust your gut. And remember, even if you’ve seen it 50 times, most of your prospects are only seeing it for the first time. If the marketing creative work stops you, it works. Do it.

2. Kill the fear before it spreads. If you start a company, and instantly start worrying about if your product has every little feature that your competitors do, you might as well name it the RX-4001i-RevA and hope that someone mistakes you for Epson, or some other company that’s been around since the earth cooled and can get away with crap like that. Apple’s products never have the best specs, most features, biggest shiniest displays, etc—and yet, even now, they’re the highest-value brand and company in the world.

3. Marketing is important, but don’t do it blindly. Today, you can measure any aspect of anything you do online, down to which ad drove which specific sales of which product. Get the reports. Sit down with the agency and torture them until they bring out the one dude who really understands them, and have him explain it to you. Do more of the stuff that works, and less of the stuff that doesn’t.

a. Corollary 1: don’t believe nearly everything an agency tells you. They’re going to trot out these ancient case studies about how branding is done, how P&G has built the Tide brand, or how Toyota built its brand, etc, and imply that those are the right models for you. 100% total bullschiit. These brands had hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to spend on a single product or model, over decades. They’re Rockefellers and sultans, completely disconnected from reality. You aren’t. Create your own can’t-be-ignored product and personality.

b. Corollary 2: see above, x10,000 if it’s “something new.” Agencies love “something new.” It’s usually confusing and not measurable, and they are more likely to win an award for it. So they’ll trot out a case study about how someone got like 12 billion views on YouTube or 1 million Facebook likes or 3 million Twitter followers, but they’ll leave out the convenient fact that (a) the company also had a $150 million ad campaign running at the time, or (b) they’re a celebrity, or (c) they were just damn lucky. Forget chasing new/easy/cheap. Marketing is none of the above.

c. Corollary 3: Mass advertising is unmeasurable, and almost never works for smaller budgets. This is why agencies love it. Well, at least the first part. Smaller budgets are defined as $10 million or less. They’ll try to dazzle you with reach and frequency and such, but bottom line, you’re not going to track a magazine ad or TV spot back to a specific purchase. Stay online. Measure. Refine. Do better.

d. Corollary 4: Mass social almost never works, unless you’re an entertainment company. Entertainment properties have fans. They’re natural for social. Almost every other company isn’t. People are there to talk to their friends, not BUY NOW. You’re entering their living room, their pub, and their coffee house. They don’t like it. Social produces 10x the results of conventional advertising for entertainment, and 1/10 the result of conventional advertising for everyone else, in our experience. Forget big social—it’s a distraction that can eat your company.

e. Corollary 5: on the other hand, micro-social almost always works, unless you’re a dick. Finding the small, specific, passionate communities that are interested in your products, whether they are barbecues, espresso machines, audio gear, or high-end bicycle accessories, is almost always worth it. Going out, joining these communities, answering questions that come up, and not selling at all is a wonderful way to get the word out. But don’t think you’re King Salesman of the Universe out to convert the masses, or start attacking other brands, moderators or forum members. One problem: most agencies are too lazy to do this hard work. And it is hard work. Pay lots of attention to micro-social, and be prepared to post, respond, meet new friends, piss some people off, delight some others, and become part of your specific niche.​

Which brings us back to reality: No audio company is truly marketing-driven. They’d bleed themselves red if they even started to try.

Being marketing-driven demands both a much larger advertising budget and a much higher level of marketing staff. It also means that the company needs to have the time and knowledge to experiment with, measure, and optimize all of its campaigns, and ensure the highest return on investment. It also means that any sales management at the company would have to coordinate closely with marketing to ensure their channels were optimized—and so they could react to any demands of the channels themselves.

If this sounds like something that’s above and beyond your typical audio company, well...that’s because it is. Most audio companies are a lot more comfortable tweaking a circuit or coming up with a cool chassis or developing an entirely new technology than reviewing the effectiveness of their behavioral targeting campaign.

In fact, pretty much all audio companies would be better served taking the advice in the aforementioned chapter 2, especially if they’re mainly direct-sale companies:

Marketing Priorities

1. The most important thing is your website and e-commerce system.
2. The second most important thing is how they work on mobile devices.
3. The third most important thing is press, and by press we mean mentions and articles both online and off, in and out of the niche press.
4. Online ads are probably next, but make sure you can track all the way to a sale. You’re shooting for a cost per sale that’s less than the profit on the sale. Don’t let them tell you anything else.
5. Everything else comes after: shows, brochures, t-shirts, lifesize figurines of your founder, skywriting, heat-activated urinal billboards (which are actually a thing), sponsoring your own events, laser-blasting your logo on the surface of the moon, etc…​

Now, there are lots of nuances even in those priorities. If you’re not direct sale, #1 can be moved down probably to #3 or so. And today, influencers are arguably as important, or more so, than the press, so chumming the waters by getting your products out to influencers before introduction might be the most important thing you do.

And even all that’s after you have your unique technology, compelling product, and clear messages as to why the device is All That And A Bag of Chips. And suddenly we’re back into marketing again (messages).

So yeah. No audio company is really a marketing company.


…Not Even Schiit

No, not even us. Not by any metric.

Spend? Ha, WAAAAYYY less than 1% of revenue. We’re amateurs compared to Bose.

Strategy? Again, no. Our marketing is, at best, ad hoc. That’s why we took a whole long detour into that “Obsolete” thing that we’re only now changing out for some funnier ads.

Tactics? Hahhahahaahahaaa, not by a long shot. We do a few ads online, have a couple of small sponsorships, and run some print ads from time to time. When we remember, we might do a cheap little brochure to give out at shows. Sometimes people suggest weird stuff to us, like sponsoring the toilets at the Pocock Beer Festival, and we do it. But there’s no grand plan, sorry.

Execution? Again, not really, but it may look and sound pretty neat. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I like to write, so we have this ongoing book. And I also like to do wacky Photoshop composites (I find it relaxing), so our artwork can sometimes look pretty good, while costing nothing. And we do use a real photographer to get good shots of our products. So maybe our stuff looks and sounds fancy.

Staffing? We have exactly one part-time person who helps out with marketing, and exactly zero sales staff. Plus my time to write the blather and do some graphics. That’s it. So no, we don’t have the staff to really be a marketing company. And yes, you read that right: no sales staff at all—no management, no specialists, no channel reps, nothing, nada, zero.

“So what the hell do you do well?” you ask. “You don’t get the rep as a marketing company for nothing, right?”

If I was to pick anything we do well, it would be this: branding.

Why?

• Our name, while profane, is hard to forget
• Our product names, while tongue-twisting, have personality and a common theme
• And we’ve embraced the silliness and aren’t scared to do things like SchiitShows, Schiitrs, and porta-potty sponsorships
• And, in addition, our look is dead-consistent, and very simple
• The Schiit site has changed little since inception
• The ads, the shirts, the brochures…all clearly from the same company

And, maybe our messaging deserves mention.

“Messaging” is fancy marketing-speak for “reasons your products are cool and people might want to buy them.” Many of our messages are not particularly deep, or start with the word “cheap.” That’s perfectly fine, because simple is good, and low price is a relevant message. But this is super-basic stuff. Take one look at a messaging guide on an Epson projector and you’ll see very quickly that we are amateurs.

But, beyond that, we’re really like any other company. We try to do a few cool things to get attention. We succeed with some. We miss with others. We forget about lots more.

Now, we don’t do the same things that other companies do, and maybe that’s part of the reason we get branded as a marketing company.

Examples?

• This book is a pretty high-profile outpost on a huge audio site, and it has a unique voice
• I also write our website, brochure, and ads, so we’ve automatically got a leg up on consistency, but it also can sound monolithic and maybe a bit marketing-y
• We’re willing to do some wackier stuff than most companies, mainly because there’s not much in the way of a review board getting in the way, so our stuff might have higher impact
• Our SchiitShows have been popular, and garner both attention and goodwill—but ironically, the Schiitshows are way more efficient than staffing tons of shows around the country

Compare our approach to other companies that market differently.

Let’s say, a company that places pre-release product with all of the important community reviewers and influencers. Suddenly, lots of people are talking about the product with a whole lot of different voices. That might sound more organic and natural, even though it requires more planning than, well, pretty much everything we do. We don’t place product for review until after intro, and we’re kinda slow and incompetent at doing that.

Or, let’s say, a company that invests heavily in sales and channel marketing, and focuses on making sure their dealers have the information and incentives they need in order to move product. These companies may be less visible online, or completely invisible (looking less marketing-y), and seem more trustworthy because it’s what the salesperson recommends. We don’t do that, either, because we’re focused on direct same.

Or, for another example, a company that relies heavily on ads in all the traditional print publications. They’ve been there for so long you may have skipped over some of their ads, because you’ve seen them so many times. Again, this “wallpaper” approach may seem less like marketing than our approach, and again, this is something we don’t do—we simply don’t place that many ads.

But, here’s the thing: these approaches aren’t right or wrong. Neither is ours.

But…ALL are marketing.


The Lazy, Disingenuous Slur

In the end, everyone markets.

Yes, every single company markets in some way or another. The tactics may be different, but every company wants to get the word out. Yes, even if they are a tiny niche company.

Let’s face it, not marketing at all is completely insane.

Which makes calling a company “just a marketing company,” a really silly slur.

Not just silly.

Also lazy.

Also disingenuous.

Disingenuous? Yes. Because calling a company “a marketing company” usually means, “I don’t like what they’re doing,” or “I don’t think they deserve to be as successful as they are,” or “I don’t believe in what they stand for.”

All of those statements are fine. Because they’re not just lazy slurs. They also reflect on you. They make it so you have to explain why you don’t like what the company is doing, or why they shouldn’t be so successful, or why you don’t believe in what they stand for. Now the statement is taken out of vacuum, and it is no longer a slur. It is an opinion.

And you know what? Opinions are completely relevant.

I get it if you don’t like Schiit.

I understand if you think what we’re doing makes no sense.

I know that we can’t please everyone.

What we can do, and what we will continue to do, is to explain what we’re doing, why we think it is important, and provide as much transparency as we can as to how and why we do it. When I started this book, I said, “When you find out how much we screw up, you may never want to buy anything from us ever again.” And I was serious.

Today, I continue to chronicle both our triumphs and mistakes. Mike does the same in his own blog here, though on a more time-limited basis (he’s got a lot of real technology to deal with). Tony does videos of how we, and our subcontractors, make our products. Even Alex and Amy chime in from time to time. So you have a good view of what we do and how we do it—even if you don’t agree that it’s the right thing to do.

Now, I understand if you still think we’re “just a marketing company.” Perceptions are hard to change. And that’s fine. The reality simply doesn’t support it.

I also completely, completely understand if you think the technology we’re spending 10x our marketing budget on is completely bonkers, and something you’re not interested in. Again, that’s fine. People don’t care that Porsche spends as much as Mercedes on R&D, if what they’re looking for is an S-Class.

(Actually, I don’t know how much either carmaker spends on R&D, but I imagine it’s a big number in either case. The point is: you can spend R&D dollars on making a car cushier, or you can spend it on making it lighter and faster. Neither approach invalidates the other.)

And no company can hit the marketing ball out of the park at all times.

Nor can every company hit count on endless tech home runs.

Both marketing and technology are required. And that’s the reality for pretty much every audio company. You can’t not market, and you can’t not develop tech.

Here’s what I’d rather do: just ditch the slur.

Maybe we accept that no company can please everyone.

Maybe we realize that marketing and technology both come in very different forms.

Maybe we realize that it’s a very, very good thing that there are many different choices.

I mean, hell, look at audio alone. Today, you can get something insanely great for under $100—or you can spend 1000x that amount. You can choose solid-state products that measure at the limits of today’s analyzers—or you could go with a completely throwback, transformer-coupled tube system and damn the numbers. You can go desktop with headphones, or rack and speakers. You can mix it up with tube hybrids. You can stream, or listen to vinyl. There’s a huge wonderful kaleidoscopic world out there, and that’s a great thing. Feel free to experiment, and to enjoy what makes you feel the best.

So how about this: why don’t we drop the sneering slur of, “just a marketing company.”

Because, like I said, everyone markets. And everyone develops their own flavor of different technologies. The end result is a vibrant, interesting market full of many different options—a market where everyone wins.

 

[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

Good story and I'm a happy fanboy.

 

[yonson]

Thanks for the new chapter @Jason Stoddard !

You guys really should offer some Schiity apparel, I'd love to have a Schiit hat, hoodie, shirt etc...

 

[pure5152]

2018, Chapter 12:
The Marketing Slur


Yes, The Marketing Slur.

You’ve heard it. You may have even used it.

You know: “Oh, they’re just a marketing company.”

Or, to expand, “They’re all flash and no substance, selling to lemmings with no ability to discern a fine product from a shiny pile. There’s no technology there, just fancy design. They spend all their money on ads and none on R&D. If you didn’t see them at Sharper Image, they’d never sell any. If they weren’t cruising on the legacy of (insert rockstar CEO name here), they wouldn’t be anywhere.”

Sounding a bit more familiar now?

The Marketing Slur is an all-purpose insult with a broad range of uses.

• Carmakers that make things a bit too out of reach? Ah, there’s no real substance there, it’s all just marketing to fool the undiscerning nouveau riche.
• A technology company with a closed-garden model? Yeah, well, everyone who buys that stuff are lemmings, led along by the nose by fancy marketing.
• An audio company that has different goals than Your One And True Personal Audio Truths? Again, it’s just that eeevil marketing, twisting the simple minds of the masses.

Lately, more and more, I’ve heard The Marketing Slur applied to Schiit.

Yes, Schiit.

“Oh yeah, they’re just a marketing company.”

“I don’t see where they spend the money, it must be just marketing.”

“Blind fanboys are the only reason Schiit exists, their marketing is really good if you’re not very bright.”

Aside: Now, none of these are actual quotes; I’m paraphrasing. But I’ve heard all of these comments, with increasing frequency, over the last year or so. You get the picture.​

And, you know what? I get it.

I used to have my own marketing company, so Schiit must be marketing-driven, right?

Schiit has silly, catchy names, so marketing must be all they think about, right?

Schiit products at least try to look good, so it must be all about the marketing, right?

Well, there’s a few inconvenient facts that get in the way of us being a marketing company. But I’ll get to those later. Instead, I’ll start with my own use of The Marketing Slur…and the trip that opened my eyes.


Jason Gets His Ass Handed to Him

I’ll admit it. Before I went to speak on virtual worlds at Harvard (this is not a joke—hell, there was an MIT Tech Review article on what we did: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/409682/historical-maps-in-second-life/), I freely talked Schiit about Bose.

Bose was clearly just a marketing company, targeting the lowest common denominator, not at all interested in sound.

Duh.

Everyone knew that.

But, after Harvard, I had a chance to go out and visit Bose on The Mountain…specifically their R&D labs. I signed an NDA, so 10 years later I’m still not comfortable saying exactly what I heard and saw, but suffice to say, Bose is NOT just a marketing company. A couple of the most impressive demos I’ve heard (and seen) to date blew that idea out of the water. I had to completely reset my notions of what the company was about after that visit.

Now, I’m not sure how much of Bose’s R&D makes it into their consumer products. I’m betting it’s a reasonable amount, but by no means all of it. I still haven’t seen some of the stuff I saw long ago in any of their products, but I also don’t follow their stuff in great detail.

So why don’t I follow what Bose is doing in detail? It’s simple. I’m not all that interested in a lot of the stuff I saw, because the applications are less tweaky high-end and more consumer-oriented.

And that underscores the important point: just because I’m not interested in their goals doesn’t mean they’re not a technology company striving to do some extremely cutting-edge stuff.

And, just because they don’t make stuff specifically targeted at me doesn’t mean they’re “just a marketing company.”

Stop. Go back and read those two previous italicized paragraphs.

And let that sink in a bit.

“Yeah, yeah, and Bose is still a marketing company,” someone says. “They spend a ton of money on ads, I see them everywhere.”

Hmm, really? Let’s look at that.

Getting figures for Bose, a private company, is not as surefire as with a public company, but if we go by their stated size of $3.8B (yes, that’s BILLION) in gross revenue in 2017, and various blatherings by AdWeek that state their advertising spend as $36MM, $150MM, or $208MM (yes, the range is that wide, probably due to Bose keeping their cards close, and different definition of “total.)

So, depending on how you slice it, Bose spends somewhere between 1% and 5% of their gross revenue on advertising.

Aside: 5% is more believable. They areeverywhere.​

But, even 5% is substantially less than the average spend by CPG (that’s consumer packaged goods) companies, which the Wall Street Journal has pegged at 24%.

Yes, twenty-four percent.

Yes, as in nearly a QUARTER of GROSS revenue.

Yes, AVERAGE.

Let that sink in.

Aside: And yeah, I’m comparing advertising spend vs total marketing budget, but if it takes Bose a billion dollars to manage a $200MM ad spend, they’re doing something very, very wrong.​

So is Bose a marketing company? Not by CPG metrics. They’re spending well below average for their revenue, and they have significant investment in R&D.

Is Bose good at advertising their products? Yes, absolutely. They are very good at getting their message out where it is effective at reaching their target audience. They are good at communicating their benefits, and differentiating from the competition.

Now, their products may not be what you want. That’s perfectly fine. But that does not make them a marketing company, nor deserving of The Marketing Slur.

And that’s something that even I had to learn.


No Audio Company is a Marketing Company…

Here’s the reality: no audio company is a marketing company.

Seriously. I’ve written about this before. The budgets needed to keep a marketing-driven company afloat will give even the largest audio players serious pause. Bose’s entire spend, across their broad product line, isn’t much bigger than what a car company spends in 3 months to launch a single car—on antiquated broadcast media alone!

Again, stop. Go back. Read that again: a car company might spend all of Bose’s ad budget in 3 months, on TV, on a single model.

And that doesn’t get into online media, print media, outdoor, in-store, and a dozen other kinds of advertising.

Nor does it get into sales promotions, spiffs, dealer incentives, and other types of channel marketing.

Nor does it go into the much more advanced stuff you can do these days, like advertising retargeting, dynamic sales page building, AI product recommendations, abandoned cart reconversion, and a half-dozen more highly measured and optimized approaches.

Nor does it differentiate marketing from advertising, branding, or sales. Because marketing is a catch-all. It’s a lazy phrase that encompasses advertising and branding, which are specific, and may even be conflated with sales, which is another catch-all that sometimes slops over into the marketing realm and vice-versa.

Like I said, I’ve written about this before. Check out the following chapters on marketing:

Chapter 2: 15 Years On the Marketing Front Lines
2016, Chapter 1: A Longer Discourse on Marketing
2017, Chapter 3: Leaving Marketing​

Hell, Chapter 2 pretty much sums it up. It stands up well, even today. Because I know you’re not keen on clicking back and forth between a bunch of links, I’ll include some of it here:

Condensed Marketing Stuff Follows

1. Most companies are too terrified to be effective at marketing. Show them something amazing, something catchy, something incredibly effective, and the first reaction (at most clients) is, “Wow, this is wonderful, let’s do it!” Then, two days later, an email appears. It usually goes like this: “Our CEO/lawyers/accountant/design intern/marketing director’s daughter/fish/dog looked at it and we’re concerned that it may be too ‘out there…” Yep. Done. Key takeaway: Don’t be scared to stand out.

2. This terror can affect everything they do, so they may not be effective at anything. The second-guessing of great ideas doesn’t stop at marketing. It usually extends all across the organization, to product development and customer service. That’s why you get so many me-to products and crap customer service. “But our competition is doing it,” whines the product manager. “But the competition doesn’t provide any better support,” says the director of customer service. Key takeaway: A race to the bottom helps nobody. Don’t benchmark yourself into mediocrity.

3. Most companies have no idea what to do in marketing. “Let’s do social, I heard it’s cheap and easy,” or, “I’m tired of the website, let’s change it,” or, “Well, all of our competitors are going to that show, so we need to be there,” or, “I know the magazines are getting less and less effective every year, but I think we need to be in the books,” is the rule of the day. Key takeaway: marketing should be a portfolio strategy, with the most money going to the most effective and measurable tactics, with detailed analytics on what is working and what isn’t. If marketing doesn’t make money, it shouldn’t be done. Period.

Why is it important:

1. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death…no, wait, that’s from Dune. But it’s true. Second-guessing your first reaction to something you love usually doesn’t result in great things. Trust your gut. And remember, even if you’ve seen it 50 times, most of your prospects are only seeing it for the first time. If the marketing creative work stops you, it works. Do it.

2. Kill the fear before it spreads. If you start a company, and instantly start worrying about if your product has every little feature that your competitors do, you might as well name it the RX-4001i-RevA and hope that someone mistakes you for Epson, or some other company that’s been around since the earth cooled and can get away with crap like that. Apple’s products never have the best specs, most features, biggest shiniest displays, etc—and yet, even now, they’re the highest-value brand and company in the world.

3. Marketing is important, but don’t do it blindly. Today, you can measure any aspect of anything you do online, down to which ad drove which specific sales of which product. Get the reports. Sit down with the agency and torture them until they bring out the one dude who really understands them, and have him explain it to you. Do more of the stuff that works, and less of the stuff that doesn’t.

a. Corollary 1: don’t believe nearly everything an agency tells you. They’re going to trot out these ancient case studies about how branding is done, how P&G has built the Tide brand, or how Toyota built its brand, etc, and imply that those are the right models for you. 100% total bullschiit. These brands had hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to spend on a single product or model, over decades. They’re Rockefellers and sultans, completely disconnected from reality. You aren’t. Create your own can’t-be-ignored product and personality.

b. Corollary 2: see above, x10,000 if it’s “something new.” Agencies love “something new.” It’s usually confusing and not measurable, and they are more likely to win an award for it. So they’ll trot out a case study about how someone got like 12 billion views on YouTube or 1 million Facebook likes or 3 million Twitter followers, but they’ll leave out the convenient fact that (a) the company also had a $150 million ad campaign running at the time, or (b) they’re a celebrity, or (c) they were just damn lucky. Forget chasing new/easy/cheap. Marketing is none of the above.

c. Corollary 3: Mass advertising is unmeasurable, and almost never works for smaller budgets. This is why agencies love it. Well, at least the first part. Smaller budgets are defined as $10 million or less. They’ll try to dazzle you with reach and frequency and such, but bottom line, you’re not going to track a magazine ad or TV spot back to a specific purchase. Stay online. Measure. Refine. Do better.

d. Corollary 4: Mass social almost never works, unless you’re an entertainment company. Entertainment properties have fans. They’re natural for social. Almost every other company isn’t. People are there to talk to their friends, not BUY NOW. You’re entering their living room, their pub, and their coffee house. They don’t like it. Social produces 10x the results of conventional advertising for entertainment, and 1/10 the result of conventional advertising for everyone else, in our experience. Forget big social—it’s a distraction that can eat your company.

e. Corollary 5: on the other hand, micro-social almost always works, unless you’re a dick. Finding the small, specific, passionate communities that are interested in your products, whether they are barbecues, espresso machines, audio gear, or high-end bicycle accessories, is almost always worth it. Going out, joining these communities, answering questions that come up, and not selling at all is a wonderful way to get the word out. But don’t think you’re King Salesman of the Universe out to convert the masses, or start attacking other brands, moderators or forum members. One problem: most agencies are too lazy to do this hard work. And it is hard work. Pay lots of attention to micro-social, and be prepared to post, respond, meet new friends, piss some people off, delight some others, and become part of your specific niche.​

Which brings us back to reality: No audio company is truly marketing-driven.They’d bleed themselves red if they even started to try.

Being marketing-driven demands both a much larger advertising budget and a much higher level of marketing staff. It also means that the company needs to have the time and knowledge to experiment with, measure, and optimize all of its campaigns, and ensure the highest return on investment. It also means that any sales management at the company would have to coordinate closely with marketing to ensure their channels were optimized—and so they could react to any demands of the channels themselves.

If this sounds like something that’s above and beyond your typical audio company, well...that’s because it is. Most audio companies are a lot more comfortable tweaking a circuit or coming up with a cool chassis or developing an entirely new technology than reviewing the effectiveness of their behavioral targeting campaign.

In fact, pretty much all audio companies would be better served taking the advice in the aforementioned chapter 2, especially if they’re mainly direct-sale companies:

Marketing Priorities

1. The most important thing is your website and e-commerce system.
2. The second most important thing is how they work on mobile devices.
3. The third most important thing is press, and by press we mean mentions and articles both online and off, in and out of the niche press.
4. Online ads are probably next, but make sure you can track all the way to a sale. You’re shooting for a cost per sale that’s less than the profit on the sale. Don’t let them tell you anything else.
5. Everything else comes after: shows, brochures, t-shirts, lifesize figurines of your founder, skywriting, heat-activated urinal billboards (which are actually a thing), sponsoring your own events, laser-blasting your logo on the surface of the moon, etc…​

Now, there are lots of nuances even in those priorities. If you’re not direct sale, #1 can be moved down probably to #3 or so. And today, influencers are arguably as important, or more so, than the press, so chumming the waters by getting your products out to influencers before introduction might be the most important thing you do.

And even all that’s after you have your unique technology, compelling product, and clear messages as to why the device is All That And A Bag of Chips. And suddenly we’re back into marketing again (messages).

So yeah. No audio company is really a marketing company.


…Not Even Schiit

No, not even us. Not by any metric.

Spend? Ha, WAAAAYYY less than 1% of revenue. We’re amateurs compared to Bose.

Strategy? Again, no. Our marketing is, at best, ad hoc. That’s why we took a whole long detour into that “Obsolete” thing that we’re only now changing out for some funnier ads.

Tactics? Hahhahahaahahaaa, not by a long shot. We do a few ads online, have a couple of small sponsorships, and run some print ads from time to time. When we remember, we might do a cheap little brochure to give out at shows. Sometimes people suggest weird stuff to us, like sponsoring the toilets at the Pocock Beer Festival, and we do it. But there’s no grand plan, sorry.

Execution? Again, not really, but it may look and sound pretty neat. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I like to write, so we have this ongoing book. And I also like to do wacky Photoshop composites (I find it relaxing), so our artwork can sometimes look pretty good, while costing nothing. And we do use a real photographer to get good shots of our products. So maybe our stuff looks and sounds fancy.

Staffing? We have exactly one part-time person who helps out with marketing, and exactly zero sales staff. Plus my time to write the blather and do some graphics. That’s it. So no, we don’t have the staff to really be a marketing company. And yes, you read that right: no sales staff at all—no management, no specialists, no channel reps, nothing, nada, zero.

“So what the hell do you do well?” you ask. “You don’t get the rep as a marketing company for nothing, right?”

If I was to pick anything we do well, it would be this: branding.

Why?

• Our name, while profane, is hard to forget
• Our product names, while tongue-twisting, have personality and a common theme
• And we’ve embraced the silliness and aren’t scared to do things like SchiitShows, Schiitrs, and porta-potty sponsorships
• And, in addition, our look is dead-consistent, and very simple
• The Schiit site has changed little since inception
• The ads, the shirts, the brochures…all clearly from the same company

And, maybe our messaging deserves mention.

“Messaging” is fancy marketing-speak for “reasons your products are cool and people might want to buy them.” Many of our messages are not particularly deep, or start with the word “cheap.” That’s perfectly fine, because simple is good, and low price is a relevant message. But this is super-basic stuff. Take one look at a messaging guide on an Epson projector and you’ll see very quickly that we are amateurs.

But, beyond that, we’re really like any other company. We try to do a few cool things to get attention. We succeed with some. We miss with others. We forget about lots more.

Now, we don’t do the same things that other companies do, and maybe that’s part of the reason we get branded as a marketing company.

Examples?

• This book is a pretty high-profile outpost on a huge audio site, and it has a unique voice
• I also write our website, brochure, and ads, so we’ve automatically got a leg up on consistency, but it also can sound monolithic and maybe a bit marketing-y
• We’re willing to do some wackier stuff than most companies, mainly because there’s not much in the way of a review board getting in the way, so our stuff might have higher impact
• Our SchiitShows have been popular, and garner both attention and goodwill—but ironically, the Schiitshows are way more efficient than staffing tons of shows around the country

Compare our approach to other companies that market differently.

Let’s say, a company that places pre-release product with all of the important community reviewers and influencers. Suddenly, lots of people are talking about the product with a whole lot of different voices. That might sound more organic and natural, even though it requires more planning than, well, pretty much everything we do. We don’t place product for review until after intro, and we’re kinda slow and incompetent at doing that.

Or, let’s say, a company that invests heavily in sales and channel marketing, and focuses on making sure their dealers have the information and incentives they need in order to move product. These companies may be less visible online, or completely invisible (looking less marketing-y), and seem more trustworthy because it’s what the salesperson recommends. We don’t do that, either, because we’re focused on direct same.

Or, for another example, a company that relies heavily on ads in all the traditional print publications. They’ve been there for so long you may have skipped over some of their ads, because you’ve seen them so many times. Again, this “wallpaper” approach may seem less like marketing than our approach, and again, this is something we don’t do—we simply don’t place that many ads.

But, here’s the thing: these approaches aren’t right or wrong. Neither is ours.

But…ALL are marketing.


The Lazy, Disingenuous Slur

In the end, everyone markets.

Yes, every single company markets in some way or another. The tactics may be different, but every company wants to get the word out. Yes, even if they are a tiny niche company.

Let’s face it, not marketing at all is completely insane.

Which makes calling a company “just a marketing company,” a really silly slur.

Not just silly.

Also lazy.

Also disingenuous.

Disingenuous? Yes. Because calling a company “a marketing company” usually means, “I don’t like what they’re doing,” or “I don’t think they deserve to be as successful as they are,” or “I don’t believe in what they stand for.”

All of those statements are fine. Because they’re not just lazy slurs. They also reflect on you. They make it so you have to explain why you don’t like what the company is doing, or why they shouldn’t be so successful, or whyyou don’t believe in what they stand for. Now the statement is taken out of vacuum, and it is no longer a slur. It is an opinion.

And you know what? Opinions are completely relevant.

I get it if you don’t like Schiit.

I understand if you think what we’re doing makes no sense.

I know that we can’t please everyone.

What we can do, and what we will continue to do, is to explain what we’re doing, why we think it is important, and provide as much transparency as we can as to how and why we do it. When I started this book, I said, “When you find out how much we screw up, you may never want to buy anything from us ever again.” And I was serious.

Today, I continue to chronicle both our triumphs and mistakes. Mike does the same in his own blog here, though on a more time-limited basis (he’s got a lot of real technology to deal with). Tony does videos of how we, and our subcontractors, make our products. Even Alex and Amy chime in from time to time. So you have a good view of what we do and how we do it—even if you don’t agree that it’s the right thing to do.

Now, I understand if you still think we’re “just a marketing company.” Perceptions are hard to change. And that’s fine. The reality simply doesn’t support it.

I also completely, completely understand if you think the technology we’re spending 10x our marketing budget on is completely bonkers, and something you’re not interested in. Again, that’s fine. People don’t care that Porsche spends as much as Mercedes on R&D, if what they’re looking for is an S-Class.

(Actually, I don’t know how much either carmaker spends on R&D, but I imagine it’s a big number in either case. The point is: you can spend R&D dollars on making a car cushier, or you can spend it on making it lighter and faster. Neither approach invalidates the other.)

And no company can hit the marketing ball out of the park at all times.

Nor can every company hit count on endless tech home runs.

Both marketing and technology are required. And that’s the reality for pretty much every audio company. You can’t not market, and you can’t not develop tech.

Here’s what I’d rather do: just ditch the slur.

Maybe we accept that no company can please everyone.

Maybe we realize that marketing and technology both come in very different forms.

Maybe we realize that it’s a very, very good thing that there are many different choices.

I mean, hell, look at audio alone. Today, you can get something insanely great for under $100—or you can spend 1000x that amount. You can choose solid-state products that measure at the limits of today’s analyzers—or you could go with a completely throwback, transformer-coupled tube system and damn the numbers. You can go desktop with headphones, or rack and speakers. You can mix it up with tube hybrids. You can stream, or listen to vinyl. There’s a huge wonderful kaleidoscopic world out there, and that’s a great thing. Feel free to experiment, and to enjoy what makes you feel the best.

So how about this: why don’t we drop the sneering slur of, “just a marketing company.”

Because, like I said, everyone markets. And everyone develops their own flavor of different technologies. The end result is a vibrant, interesting market full of many different options—a market where everyone wins.

YES! THIS!!

Just recently encountered the marketing slur on Massdrop... it’s one of the things that’s made me a bit cynical of the Massdrop community lately :/

https://www.massdrop.com/buy/massdrop-x-thx-aaa-789-linear-amplifier/talk/2269557

(I tried to defend schiit, as it pissed me off that people, especially a member of the trade, was making blind accusations of schiit. That’s just poor style. I’m pure5152 on Massdrop.)

 

[Robert Padgett]

My two cents worth about Massdrop...Some unrepentant, and virulent Haters seem to dominate discussion in the comments section. Any attempt to interject a different opinion about anything is met with a crowd of torch-bearing and pitch-fork wielding zealots. The phenomena of over-reaction by fanboys seems to be a consistant feature, with ad hominum attacks the fare of the day. With the sole exception of the Senn 6XX headphones and nice leather notebooks, they are for the most part just a junk-email marketer to blissfully ignorant morons. And the gamers (another phenomea realted to the blissfully ignorant) seem to advocate for that which is of interest only to them. I have never played a video game in my life, and if the attitude of some of those who do makes even less likely I would ever want to attempt that.

 

[FLTWS]

I like my modest Bose 5.1 surround. It has served me well, has been bullet proof, great tech support when I needed it twice since the mid 90's (it doesn't owe me a dime) and I remember it was a pleasure, not a chore, to get help from them when I needed it. They even upgraded it for me once. It serves a need for me and keeps me from losing my lease as would certainly happen if I could put in the HT audio system I would want to.

Schiit and few other small specialty companies have allowed me to get my higher end audio fix with HP's and related gear.

I don't regret one day, one purchase, or one dollar invested, since I got started with personal audio in my home.

I'm still having fun and enjoying the music.