GreenKnee wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 4:39 am
Perhaps if Fender were buying out smaller builders like BilT and using them to bolster their own business it could be seen to be more like Larry's analogy. As I see it, Fender makes a LOT of guitars and most of those are models they know will sell. What would be the point in Fender changing up it's whole production line to create something that just isn't going to sell?
Well, they did bring in Ron Thorn, but that's a small example compared to what the beer conglomerates do. No two industries are the same, but the strategy of the big conglomerate smothering competition remains the same.
And you are correct, most of the guitars they make are models that they know will sell. But they also make some models that they know aren't going to sell in significant numbers that would make any difference in the bottom line. Ask yourself, why do they make those? Why did they make the Telemaster after years of seeing other guitar makers make them? In the face of the Telecaster, the Telemaster didn't make a whit of difference to Fender's bottom line.
Also remember that Fender has bought companies like Charvel, so they do have a history of buying competition, again though that's not an exact 1:1 analogy since at that point Charvel had ceased to be any kind of real competition.
GreenKnee wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 4:39 am
Fender produce what they know will sell, and at least they let smaller builders borrow heavily from their original designs without having to take them to court like some other brands do.
Fender has sued other companies, and like Gibson, they have largely lost those. So they don't "let" anyone borrow their designs, they just can't legally enforce those designs other than the headstock. And even then, they probably don't take all the infringements to court because it's a time waster and they really don't need to even bother.
Let's also remember that on top of Fender's very powerful marketing strategies, they have another incredibly powerful weapon: the dealership. Let's say you own a guitar store, and you ask for and are awarded status as a Fender dealer. That will make you money.
Then let's say there's a local guy who makes better Strat designs than Fender makes, and you love those guitars. You carry them also. Then one day Fender finds out, and says we consider those to be infringing on our trademarks, we are considering a suit, but until then if you continue to carry those guitars we will revoke your dealership and you can no longer sell our guitars.
Fender can survive losing you. Can you survive losing Fender? What choice do you make?
I might not have gotten into it, but let's consider the fact that shelf space is limited. When A-B Inbev puts out a pale ale (the most miserable beer ever) from a company that they bought, that's less shelf space that other companies have to get into the supermarket. If you are a local maker of pale ales, simply getting your beer into the supermarkets is harder, since supermarkets already have a full portfolio of all kinds of beer from the conglomerate that they are already dealing with.
Regardless this is another incredibly powerful "soft power" that conglomerates have. To illustrate this with my beer analogy, Anheuser Busch genuinely did lose shelf space to microbrew competitors, and shelf space is everything. They responded by literally
giving away refrigerators to grocery stores and bars:
BOSTON—A battle is brewing in Massachusetts between state regulators and Anheuser-Busch InBev NV over allegations the beer giant has provided nearly $1 million in unlawful giveaways to entice retailers and bars to push Budweiser over rivals.
The state’s Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission has issued a report detailing investigators’ findings and set a June hearing in Boston on the matter. The report alleges a subsidiary of AB InBev gave out bar equipment as incentives to hundreds of Massachusetts businesses in violation of a state law meant to keep beer companies from squeezing out competitors.
Sales representatives “offered the refrigeration equipment to the retailers at no cost, provided the equipment was only utilized for Budweiser products,” investigators said in the report.
So when you see Fender making things like the Telemaster, or the Meteora, remember that they don't have to make a lot of money on these, and they don't. If Fender never made these it wouldn't matter to that company in any way. It does, though, matter to
other companies. Fender, like most huge, international corporations, is a very tall oak that grabs all the sunlight it can so that nothing grows beneath it.
GreenKnee wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 4:39 am
Fenders newer outings such as the Meteora are very cool looking to me, but they seem to get slated as soon as their newest guitar isn't an exact vintage copy of a classic S,T or offset guitar. They're stuck between a rock and a hard place as far as innovation goes. American Ultra - the people who have them rate them very highly, the people who slate the specs despise them.
I should mention that I don't consider the Meteora to be any kind of new model, really. Sure, it has a new name, but it's just guitar parts that were designed 80 years ago in some cases recycled onto another body. And that's fine, there was no new technology on the Musicmasters or anything either. But in my mind I usually draw a contrast between the time when Fender was really progressive and made new products that had technology that no one had ever seen before, like the offset waist of the Jazz bass, or the unique vibrato unit of the Mustang, and so on.
They don't really do that anymore, because they control the market and guitar players allow Fender and others to dictate what is and what isn't "good" in electric guitars, so Fender stifles innovation, it doesn't really help them after all, since their bread and butter guitars are designs that came about in the 50s and if they had new, successful designs it would just be Fender competing against themselves, right?
Which is why I am talking about that California Special there. That has new technology on it... a bridge that is so good you can't even buy it, and a unique vibrato unit and maybe pickups.
If Fender was the company they want to appear to be, they would be developing stuff like
that.
Look if A-B Inbev didn't bother with buying small brewers and undercutting potential competition, they would still be an incredibly successful and profitable company. Budweiser sells, and for some reason Michelob Ultra is something that people will buy. So why do they do this?
Well, it allows them to control what the beer market actually
is. They don't just compete there, they set the stage for what the beer market and its consumers have access to and in such a way they can control the future of it.
This is what Fender does also, and the reason I write what I do is to show people that. It's not a perfect analogy between Fender and A-B Inbev, of course. But my point is there is
nothing cool about the Fender Custom Shop, they only opened that up to undercut competition they were already finding out there. Most of their "new" models aren't really designed to do anything other than grab sunlight from other competitors, and you can tell because they don't really offer anything that their existing bread and butter instruments don't in the end.
And look, I know I've gone into greater depth about this than a couple of bad Custom Shop Fenders deserved. At the same time, though, I get pretty tired of people saying I "hate" Fender and so on, and I don't. I don't hate them. I just see them for what they are, I have a pretty good understanding of what they are doing in the marketplace, and ultimately I think that they are a very big reason for why the concept of what an electric guitar is has been so stagnant. That is to say, the biggest electric guitar maker in the world doesn't really
want guitar technology to progress since that runs contrary to their own products, and is it really a coincidence that guitar technology really doesn't progress? Can anyone believe that?
To wrap it up: there is a big difference between beer makers and guitar makers that no one has pointed out. For whatever reason, the big beer makers like Anheuser-Busch
had to change in the face of competition. Whether they liked it or not, there were new products out there that were capturing significant sales away from their core products.
Guitar makers didn't, though. Remember that
everyone is marketed to, and everyone is marketed to
successfully. That's all there is to it.
The equivalent in the world of beer would be if there were new brands out there that were pale ales, but the overwhelming attitude with beer drinkers was that there was nothing better than Busch, that there could not be anything better than Busch, and that the state of beer making reached its apex with the creation of Busch and there was simply no need for any other kind of beer, and then pale ales disappeared (which they should, awful) and there were only variations of Busch being made anywhere. That's kind of the guitar market.
Back in those days, everyone knew that if you were talking about Destiny's Child, you were talking about Beyonce, LaTavia, LeToya, and Larry.