• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 685 0

Fender’s sales increased dramatically and the company extended its product offerings around the growing requirements of the electrical guitarists, producing not only strings and guitars, but also audio products such as amplifiers and mixing boards. The secret to Fender’s continued success rests in its understanding of the values that made the brand so popular in the first place – namely, craftsmanship and a deep understanding of the contemporary guitarist. When those values were temporarily forgotten, during CBS’ reign of 1965 to 1985, the brand suffered.

Now, Fender is back on track and its customers are more appreciative of the brand than ever before. As the Fender-strat.com website enthuses, ‘Fender has maintained its hold on the hearts, minds, and fingers of guitarists everywhere with relentless quality, as well as some of the highest research and development commitments in the industry.’

This view is supported by another non-official guitar website, harmony-central.com. On that site, Fender-lover Richard Smith congratulates the brand on surviving the CBS years and on its return to its core values. ‘The Fender company is still shaping the way the world plays and hears music, and making life better for guitar players,’ he says.

Lessons from Fender

Understand your product. One of the main problems CBS faced was that it had little real understanding of what exactly made Fender so special. ‘Most companies don’t do their homework,’ says Howard Moskowitz, the president of New York-based market research firm, Moskowitz Jacobs. ‘They don’t really know anything about the dynamics of their product, about the drivers of liking in a product that they’re going to go into.’

Focus on what built the brand. CBS neglected the attention to quality and craftsmanship which had established the Fender brand in the first place.

63 Quaker Oats’ Snapple

Failing to understand the essence of the brand

In 1994, food giant the Quaker Oats Company bought a quirky soft-drink brand called Snapple for US $1.7 billion. The company felt confident that the drink brand was worth the price tag, because it had already achieved an astounding success with the sports drink Gatorade.

However, in terms of brand identity the two drinks couldn’t have been further apart. Gatorade was about sports and a high-energy, athletic image. Snapple, on the other hand, had always been promoted as a New Agey and fashionable alternative to standard soft drink brands.

As many commentators at the time observed, Quaker Oats simply didn’t understand what the Snapple identity was all about. Specifically, there were two main reasons why Quaker’s three years in charge of Snapple diminished the brand’s value.

Reason number one has to do with distribution. Before 1994, most Snapple drinks were sold at small shops and petrol stations. However, Quaker deployed its usual mass marketing techniques and placed the brand in supermarkets and other inappropriate locations.

The other problem was the way Quaker decided to promote the product, abandoning eccentric advertising campaigns in favour of a more conservative approach. The day after Quaker announced that it would sell the Snapple drink business for US $300 million (over five times lower than the price they had bought it for), the New York Times pointed the finger at the misguided advertising campaigns. ‘Quaker discontinued its quirky campaign featuring a Snapple employee named Wendy Kaufman, and replaced it with one in which Snapple boasted that it would be happy to be third behind Coca- Cola and Pepsi in the beverage market.’ The ‘real life’ US advertising featuring Wendy Kaufman, a receptionist reading fan letters from consumers, had been a real hit, but Quaker decided to come up with a new advertising campaign using the same company which produced its Gatorade campaigns. The end result was a counterproductive advertising campaign which succeeded in ‘normalizing’ Snapple’s previously quirky identity.

As sales started to slide, Quaker believed it held the solution – send sales reps out on to the streets to ask