A recent article on the Sporting Goods Business website covered the changing role of the independent rep in the sporting goods and apparel industry. The magazine’s “SGB Question” addresses the same topic this week. From the article and the responses to the question from reps, retailers and suppliers, it’s clear that the job of the rep is changing fast and that one of the catalysts for this change is technology.
At first blush, that would lead you to believe that most reps are early adopters, taking advantage of the newest tools for communication, marketing and business management. While it’s always hard to gauge the tech savvy of large and disparate groups, I just stumbled across something that may shed a little light on how technically enabled reps really are. Read the rest of this entry »
Every client we’ve ever done workbooks for (and we’ve done a lot of workbooks) has replied something like this when asked how many books they’d like to print:
“We’ll, I’m not sure. We printed x-thousand last year and we had a lot of boxes sitting around the warehouse. But the year before that we ran out. Uh, I’m not sure, let me ask Sales.”
As you can imagine, Sales will want to err on the side of surplus for safety and the topic is put on hold until the next season. What’s funny is that the number never seems to bear any relation to the number of reps, the number of accounts or the number of doors.
Given the state of everyone’s marketing budget, I imagine we’ll start to see some pushback from our friends in marketing departments.
“How many workbooks do you really need?” could be the mantra of S10.
I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of golfer-climbers out there. Leisure activities tend to map to lifestyle and your average country club member and a Camp IV dirtbag are unlikely to share the same hairdresser. They may, however, have more in common than you think.
I have two friends who land at opposite ends of the middle-aged lifestyle spectrum. One is a huge golfer, an every-waking-hour, never-sees-his-kids kind of golfer. The other is a backcountry addict, an ex-NOLS, cache-to-cache kind of camper. But when you ask them why they do what they do, their answers are remarkably similar.
Bill, the golfer, will say he loves golf because it’s just him and the ball. When he steps up to the ball, everything else falls away. What’s left is the kind of purity you don’t find in everyday life. He can hit the ball well. Or he can blow it. But it’s entirely up to him. Read the rest of this entry »
