Deezie
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Fred Gallico wrote: Dude this is just embarrassing for you. Perhaps you should also contact Miller and Canon to see if you can help advise them too. Maybe you can help turn them into successful companies. Include some of the recent ramblings you've posted on the internet....that ought to close the deal!
Are you seriously attempting to make an insightful point by starting out with the word, "Dude?" You've just been removed from the adult table and can eat your holiday dinner with the kids for the remainder of this discussion.
Your perception of corporate brands (Canon, Miller) as faultless seems rather naive given the recent stumbles by Bank of America, American Express, Goldman Sachs, General Motors and other well-established notables that have turned to the government for handouts to survive. And lest you forget the recent closings of venerable chains such as Circuit City, Compusa, Linen's & Things, Mervyns, I think you can get a clear picture that one never knows about the troubles of a brand until matters are quite dire.
Corporate brands hire companies like mine all the time, and we're currently on retainer with several international brands that I have relationships with going all the way back to my years at Ogilvy. It's a part of the business culture to get an objective assessment from outsiders who specialize in branding because company executives are too much in the thick-of-things to see the forest for the trees, so to speak. So thanks for the advice, Fred, but I'm already in contact with many large brands in an advisory capacity. It's what I've done for the past twenty years and have an expertise in this particular area.
BrianO wrote: Two brands? Let's see, he has White Lightning, Zeus, Alien Bees; I count that as three brands. ABMax will be model within the Alien Bees lineup, not a seperate brand, just as you can buy a Ford Focus and a Ford Ranger while staying within the Ford brand. Following that analogy, White Lightning and Zeus could be compared with Lincoln and Mercury; different brands from the same parent company, Paul C. Buff, Inc.
Frankly, your poorly thought out comments don't give you much credability as a "marketing expert."
Brian -- there's a difference between line extension and segmentation. Buff's products are all basically within the same price range, which promotes cannibalism within his own lines, which wouldn't occur if he had both a reasonably-priced product in addition to a professional, higher-priced line. If you consider that he will have the White Lightning, AB's and now the Einsteins, then that creates overlap. Sometimes this works, but generally, the brand finds itself working much harder to just maintain the same market share.
This could also be a brand misstep, such as when Jaguar introduced a line of low-cost cars. The guys paying $70k for their status car realized that they no longer had bragging rights after passing a kid on the streets who paid almost $50k less for the same brand. Jaguar soon realized that this was a misstep and retired the line of cheap cars. I don't know that this type of model will effect Paul, since his low-cost lights are his core line. But cost really is the primary motive for buying his lights. He offers great customer service, but his lights offer the most bang for the buck over competitors in his price range. If the new monolights by Profoto we're priced the same as the AB's, they'd very likely steal away most of Paul's customer base - fan boys and all.
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