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 p.8 #18 · NIKON NEWS -- Worse than I thought (*NOT my words). | |
mapgraphs wrote:
The elephant in the room (not the one these clowns keep trying to pass off as a tree trunk) is the D850 et. al. and the established Nikon user base. Aside from the users who traded their D850 for the Z7, a lot of the established base is going to move slowly to upgrade, but they will eventually upgrade - to a newer Nikon. Nikon makes the best digital still camera, the one everything else is measured against. Period.
The caveat here is 'will they actually upgrade'. People expected this from the D780 for D750 & D6x0 users. It really didn't happen. D750 users largely kept their D750's or moved elsewhere (and elsewhere was largely not a Z6).
Nikon needs compelling options for their installed base. We've now seen 3 DSLR releases in a row from Nikon for the enthusiast & pro markets that simply aren't compelling (the D7500, the D780 and the D6). Competent for sure, but not compelling and all of these seem to have had sales issues (oddly the D6 seems to both be in short supply and moving slowly, which suggests Nikon isn't producing very many of them).
This is as much or more Nikon's marketing issues than the hardware itself. Nikon doesn't know what their users want anymore (Because they don't talk to users), doesn't know how to position what their engineers are creating in the market, doesn't know how to manage the modern PR environment (they're still managing PR like it was 2000 and Magazines and the big name stores are all that mattered) and has complete missed the boat on managing the story around the Z mount.
Canon and Nikon (and Pentax and Leica...) have weathered down cycles, and know what to expect. And in the past have marketed to their existing base... Unlike consumer electronics companies which will move from one piece of electronics to another, or simply drop an entire line, without a second thought.
DL, OneMission, CX... Nikon will drop entire lines without a thought.
They ARE a consumer electronics company, willing to admit it or not. And they do behave like it, except consumer electronics companies engage with consumers and Nikon doesn't.
The difference is in the manufacturing details. Some companies build products to last; other companies build to mass market. Canon and Nikon have a long term view of product... they don't use plastic clips or shims in place of lock screws. Their cameras are going to be working for decades, hence, they're going to look to their established base because they have invested in the goodwill....
D800 AF & frame issues, D600 shutter, D750's multiple recalls, Z6/7 AF, D850 max FPS challenges (due to contact issues on the grip), D500 lockups, the D6 is already looking like a potentially badly buggy release (nobody's sure if it's bugs or just bad documentation around VR/FPS interaction)
Nikon's spent 10 years building a rep for buggy hardware on initial release and being unwilling to address or even admit to mistakes in manufacturing or design.
Also the CFe update for the D5/D850/D500 which was announced in February 2019 is now 18 months late...
"the established reputation of a business regarded as a quantifiable asset... "
So true, and Nikon has unfortunately does a very bad job of managing their reputation for the last 10 years or so. They've both over-relied on their rep and badly bruised it at the same time.
Nikon isn't failing, but if they don't start solving their marketing engagement issues, all the good engineering in the world won't sell cameras that people don't know about and which don't have the changes the users want. Nikon needs to start doing better with each release, rather than repeating the same mistakes over & over, or even worse, making new & obvious ones (Z5 announcement was a trainwreck, they did everything wrong in terms of the launch itself after watching Panasonic, Canon & Sony do most things right, and it was followed by Olympus & Panasonic doing things right. Just look at the S5 buzz vs the Z5. The Z5 should have far more buzz, but nobody had them until a month after the announcement and by then, nobody cared because something else was new & interesting)
The number one thing Nikon needs to do is figure out that their Ambassadors are not just for producing images for ads which have known names on them. They need to get hardware in the hands of their ambassadors prior to launch of anything and engage with potential Ambassadors who are active in Social media. Contrast Nikon's handling with how Fuji & Olympus in particular use their Ambassadors (Fuji is the absolute king of this and it's a large reason why they've gone from zero to #3 in the mirrorless space, #4 overall in the market since 2012). Sony, Panasonic & Canon do good jobs as well, Nikon doesn't even bother. We should have been flooded by posts from big-name Nikon shooters demonstrating the Z5 at the end of July. Instead we waited a month for a handful to get their mitts on them a few days before the retail release. I wonder why pre-orders of the Z5 were reported to be weak? Because the Z5 simply wasn't on anybody's radar because Nikon Marketing only put out an ad or two rather than actually running a proper campaign.
Edited on Sep 09, 2020 at 08:17 AM · View previous versions
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