2015, Chapter 10:
Knowing Our Place?
First of all, thanks to everyone who commented on last week’s chapter. We’re listening to all of your thoughts, input, and suggestions…and I can already say that a lot of you are going to be pretty thrilled with where we’re going. Last week, before heading off to TheShow Newport, Mike and I had some long conversations and solidified many of our plans going forward.
But…Hmm…TheShow Newport.
Let’s make that (and trade shows, meets, etc, in general) the subject of this week’s chapter, while it’s fresh in my mind.
If you’ve been reading along from the start, you know I’m not the biggest fan of trade shows, nor the best planning and logistics mastermind on the planet. To sum up quickly for those new to the book: audio trade shows are a great place to hear some of the best gear in the worst possible venues on the planet, while enduring bad hotel food and perhaps picking up a nice cold or flu along the way.
And, if you’re an exhibitor, knowing you’ll
always forget something, that something will
always break, and that things won’t go the way you expect,
always.
Like TheShow. When I found out we were in a glorified tent hidden well outside the hotel, rather than in a ballroom, there you go. Not what I expected. As
always.
Yes, you read that right. Headphonium exhibitors got stiffed. The traffic was crap. If a headphone exhibitor was counting on exposure, this was a real kick in the nuts.
And, it was also a reminder of where we stand in the whole scheme of things, audio-wise. For those drooling over gold-plated audio jewelry, lovingly hewn out of solid blocks of unobtanium, headphone audio is still little more than a curiosity.
Maybe we should do shows at colleges. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
So Why’d You Go, Dummy?
Okay, yeah, I hear the snarky voice in the back of the crowd, saying,
Well, if shows suck so much and you got boned, why’d you go?
Two reasons:
- We thought we’d be introducing some new stuff. But it was late. Ah, well. Look to mid-August (but not at a show.)
- We didn’t know the degree of bonage we’d be getting. TheShow was at a new venue this year, and they changed the location of the Headphonium exhibits.
It could have been worse. We could have been cooking in a literal tent. The AC in the hard-sided contraption they had set up was so powerful that we had to wear sweaters. And they tried to get traffic to the Headphonium with signs and some relatively scary-looking vehicles (which have
what to do with audio, but hey, who the heck knows what people think?)*
*Disclaimer: I am a car guy. But over-the-top black and gold Mustangs that recall very bad images of Trans Ams and dudes with chains and chest hair are, well, not my cup of tea.
But in the end, the proof is in the results. And even though the crowds came out to see the gilded two-channel rooms in “the tower,” they largely ignored the poor little guys out in the Headphonium. I doubt if we saw more than a handful of people who weren’t already at CanJam just a couple of months ago.
So, lesson learned: if we’re going to be going to a two-channel show, bring two-channel stuff.
We have Ragnarok and Yggdrasil. We could have done exactly that. I just forgot about that before the show. We should have picked some great direct-sale speakers and showed up in the tower. That probably would have been worthwhile. Headphones, not so much.
The Business Lesson
Here it is, in one sentence: don’t conflate two seemingly similar industries, or else.
Or else you’ll get bitten.
Or else you’ll lose money.
Or else you’ll waste time.
We made the mistake of lumping two-channel stuff in with headphone stuff. Not a good idea. Headphone stuff hasn’t gone (as far) down the road to gold-plated Bentley audiophilia that nobody can afford. (Though current trends are worrying…continual price inflation pushing the top end constantly higher, manufacturers now asking buyers “how much do you think we can sell this for?” rather than pricing at a simple multiplier of BOM cost, obsessive focus on aesthetics, cosmetics, machined-from-a-single-block silliness,* ad infinitum.)
*Yes, I know, Apple does this. They also make a hundred million or so of their widgets a year. Not a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand. If we made a hundred million widgets a year and had a foundry sitting right next to the machining center so we could immediately recycle the Pacific Ocean of chips we’d be creating, maybe we’d do that too. Or maybe not.
I should have known. I’ve seen this same thing happen before in many industries. I’ve even seen it happen in our own industry, for the clients that Centric serves. Every once in a while, we get an audio company that wants to reach outside the traditional high-end audio realm. This is always:
- Very costly.
- Not very effective.
- Abandoned after spending a ton of money.
Repeat after me:
- A Beats customer isn’t necessarily a Schiit customer.
- A Levinson customer isn’t necessarily a Mr. Speakers customer.
- An AVR customer is not necessarily a Levinson customer, nor a Beats customer, nor a Schiit customer.
- A sound bar customer, again, isn’t necessarily any of the above.
- And yet all are “audio” customers.
Sounds simple, yes. But it’s sometimes even easier to forget.
So, if you’re starting your own business, the first thing is to know where you fit. Or else you might end up spending a lot courting customers that simply don’t get what you do.
And this is especially important for shows and meets. Why? Because even though headphone audio is still the gnat on the fly’s ass of high-end audio, the expectations of a decent show presence go beyond just plunking your stuff down on a table. It takes quite a bit of money and energy to make a trade show work. Consider all of this:
Pre-show stuff:
- Getting all your products together.
- Getting all your headphones together.
- Making sure you have every single connector/cable/etc you need for them.
- Deciding on sources (we have gone through three different tablet sources before finally settling on one we like—this was not cheap in terms of money—or, especially, time. It takes a ton of time to set up sources, do updates, transfer all music, arrange it logically in libraries, etc.
- Have something to identify the company made—backwall, or go crazier.
- Have something to identify the products made—tabletop graphics or more.
- Have some brochures or handouts or something.
- Get hotel rooms (preferably at the show hotel, and not the show holding the furry convention down the street, because you were too lazy to get the rooms in time—ask me how I know this.)
- Decide who’s going to the show, and get them there, maybe involving airfare.
- Send a press release if you have any new products and invite press.
- Consider doing a pre-show or at-show event, and plan for that.
- Pay for your show space.
- Do an ad for the show guide (did you see ours?)
- And about fifteen other things I’m probably forgetting. Ask Denise. She’s very, very good at that stuff.
At-the-show stuff:
- Setting up and breaking down the booth.
- Fixing anything that goes wrong.
- Finding replacements for the stuff you forgot.
- Making sure all staff is there when you want them to be (staff scheduling).
- Deciding on a policy for expenses and incidentals for staff (are you paying for drinks, for example?)
- For really crazy corpocrat people, deciding on a policy for what staff can and cannot say.
- Answering questions and helping people who stop by.
- Resetting the players after demos so people know what they’re listening to.
- Dealing with any computer interface problems.
- Dealing with any operational problems, including intermittent power from the hotel, etc.
- Talking to press, doing demos, etc.
- Again, about a dozen things I’m missing. Denise?
And post-show stuff:
- Following up on everyone you promised to get back to.
- Descrewifying the pile of equipment, headphones, etc you brought back from the show so it’s ready for the next show.
- Fixing or replacing anything that got damaged.
- Planning for the next show.
Bottom lines, shows take a ton of time and energy—and, in true Murphy fashion, they usually happen exactly when you’d rather be spending that time on new product development or something more, well, critical to your business.
But shows can be valuable, too. If you’re looking for dealers or distributors, absolutely. If you’re introducing new product and know the press you want to see are gonna be there, you bet. Unfortunately for us, we were in neither mode for TheShow, and it was too far down the path to just pull out.
And if we’d had any presence of mind, we’d have remembered that we’re in the middle of moving out of the “headphone only” mode. Although we’re very well-known in the headphone community, two-channel guys are only beginning to discover us.
Which means we should have gone to TheShow with Ragnarok and Yggdrasil and speakers. Nothing more.
The New Show Strategy
In talking to other exhibitors at TheShow (hell, we had to do something, it was pretty dead), we’ve come to the following “brilliant” conclusions:
- Bring headphone gear to CanJams, meets, and other shows that are truly dedicated to headphones. CanJams are excellent places to be in the headphone world. And there are plenty of them to go to, all around the world. A company could have a full show schedule by attending only CanJams.
- Decide on some speakers, or partner up with some speaker guys, and start showing speaker stuff at two-channel shows. That includes shows like TheShow Newport and AXPONA and RMAF. Of course, that makes RMAF very interesting, because of the added logistics of having both a CanJam exhibit and a speaker room. Especially since I don’t think I’ll be there this year (I’m having a big birthday, and yeah, sorry, guys, I am not going to sacrifice another birthday to RMAF, though I really do love you all…well, in a non-creepy way, of course.)
Yeah, I know. Not rocket science. But I’m not done.
- Do some of our own shows. Those new products? They’re probably going to be too late for CanJam NorCal, and too early for RMAF (which we’ll have some other new stuff at). So, why not do something ourselves around mid-August? Details TBD, of course, but that’s what we’re thinking about.
- Start looking at having a presence at smaller, regional meets. Beyond CanJam, there are plenty of meets. We need to make sure our newest and hottest stuff is there, so you can have a listen to it. How we’ll do this is currently open to discussion, but I’m sure we can be more present than we’ve been.
And let’s be clear—we’re not going to be abandoning the headphone community for two-channel high end. However, now that we do have (some) two-channel products, it’s time to start showing up to the party. Which will be fun in itself…fending off the dealers and distributors, and watching people’s eyes go crossed when they hear our name.
But let’s take it a bit farther. What might happen if we decided to re-mix the traditional audio show entirely? After all, all audio shows pretty much use the same format: invite audio companies to buy as much space as they can and bring whatever they want. In that format, of course the guys with more money, time, and staff are gonna be the most impressive, every single time.
So, what about some new show ideas? I’m blue-skying here, feel free to add.
- A show where everyone gets the same amount of space. In the headphone world, call it just one table. What would you do with that, if you couldn’t bring your 30-foot backwall and light show? Who would look most impressive then?
- Better, a show where everyone is allowed to bring only a single system. Regardless of how big or small they are. It’s easy for us to look impressive and big with 8 separate systems from $79 to $3998, but what if we had to bring just a single system? What would we bring? And why? What would everyone else bring? Would it make sense to go all-out, or impress with budget-constrained products?
- Or how about a show with “no system over $1,000?” How would that go? What would we find if the top-end is lopped off of the show, and we all have to bring budget gear?
- Or maybe better, a show segregated by budget? This would definitely help prevent heart failure when people start asking about prices.
- Meets that challenge you. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole objective/subjective dichotomy we have in audio lately, and I think it may be time to create a new kind of test. Not ABX with unfamiliar music, but something much more interesting—letting people choose their own music and switch between two different signal chains when they wanted (both level-matched and with distortion lower than audibility, you know, typical “good test results.” The goal would be to see if (a) a consistent majority preferred one signal chain over another, and (b) to see how many people could consistently tell the difference. Yes, I know, this kind of test will never satisfy the ABX folks, but I think it might get us a little closer to the truth about whether or not there are some people who consistently hear audible differences in systems that should sound the same. I suspect the answer is neither 100% subjective nor 100% objective, but a continuum…some people can hear the difference, some can’t, some care, some don’t…and all of that is fine. Of course, this is a big undertaking, but…hmmm…I need to think about this some more, I kinda just write stuff as it comes to me.
So, am I crazy or what? (Yes, I know, you’re probably laughing and nodding your head.) But I will say one thing: the past years I’ve spent in headphone audio has been more fun than all the years of two-channel, home theater, and video servers put together. There’s still a fresh, raw edge to the headphone side that I really don’t want to see plowed under in the ongoing rush to unobtanium pricing.
I’m hoping we can help keep the headphone side on its toes.
(I’m sure you’ll let me know if we don’t.)
And with that, I’ll sign off…with one last reminder…that as of June 15, we’ll be celebrating exactly 5 years of being “shock over substance,” “a flash in the pan” and “flavor of the month.”
Here’s to the next 5 years!
