High Altitude Marketeering

I’ve been involved on and off in an online discussion about how to broaden the outdoor market’s consumer base. How, participants ask, do we reach age, ethnic and socio-economic groups outside the core user base?

MEC seems to be taking a stab at reaching younger consumers by encouraging their existing customers to recruit new customers in the 16–24 age range. Read the rest of this entry »

Just got another marketing email from Nau and they seem to have swung back to the old brand identity. Path correction or the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing?

Fresh in my inbox this AM is a marketing email from Nau—or is it from Horny Toad. The lines are beginning to blur. I’ve been waiting to see signs of brand bleed as Horny Toad marketers begin to influence the Nau messaging. The new promotional email is the first hint that this is beginning to happen. Read the rest of this entry »

Is the outdoor industry ready for online-only workbooks? They’re cheaper than printed workbooks. That’s good. Reps and buyers won’t like it. That’s bad. So far, it’s a tie. Here’s the tie-breaker. Never mind your worries about luddite dealers with no high-speed internet in their stores, at Outdoor Retailer, the premier industry trade show, you can barely send an email, let alone load pagefulls of products. Read the rest of this entry »

During political campaigns, media handicappers talk about “positive” and “negative” opinion numbers. Successful candidates need the right mix of both. High positives and high negatives indicate great name recognition—voters know who you are, they’re just very divided in their opinion of you, often an indication that a candidate will do well with a core constituency but poorly with moderate voters.

Brands are subject to the same opinion polarization and big brands are often the most polarizing of all. So how do you deal with the negatives if you’re a Walmart or a Starbucks looking to appeal to the big fat middle? Starbucks is about to try an innovative approach: wearing a disguise. Read the rest of this entry »

Every week, my inbox fills up with marketing emails from outdoor retailers and the brands they carry. They are, for the most part, straightforward promotional messages, focusing on a specific promotion or promotional items. Nau’s emails tend to be different—not surprising for a brand trying to stake out new ground. They are text-heavy, low on the promotion and heavy on the brand story and issues complementary to their brand message of sustainable manufacturing and environmental activism. I seldom read them.

But this week’s Nau email was different. Read the rest of this entry »

Coleman’s new ad campaign makes the tongue-in-cheek case that Coleman invented social networking. It makes a tenuous comparison between online socializing and socializing at a camp site. The campaign fails in a couple ways. Read the rest of this entry »

At first glance, Amazon’s new Kindle electronic book reader doesn’t seem to have much to do with the business of selling outdoor gear. But a recent TechCrunch article touched on an issue we’ve been wrestling with as we develop smarter ways to create dealer catalogs. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid is skeptical about the future of the Kindle as the killer app for college texts because of major shortcoming: note taking functionality.

Buyers tell us that the ability to easily mark up a workbook, make notes and sketch out a buy is the best thing about printed dealer workbooks. Until there’s a note-taking technology that makes annotating an electronic workbook as easy as marking up a paper one, electronic-only solutions won’t work for buyers or reps. In reality, the hurtle might be even higher: first we need a technical solution, then we need time for users to get used to it as a medium for note taking. And that could take a while, regardless of where tech takes us.

At some point in every discussion of sales collateral, someone says “Let’s just put it online.” With the current pressure to reduce marketing spending making it even more attractive to move away from printed catalogs, it makes sense to look at the pros and cons of this electronic-only approach to sell-in materials.

The desire to abolish paper catalogs isn’t new. Back in the 90’s, brands were playing with the idea of publishing dealer catalogs on CD. Since then, new technologies have enabled everything from a catalog on a thumb drive to dealer websites. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. New technologies may add new tools to your marketing tool kit but it’s just as important as ever to make sure that you’re using the right tool for the job. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »