November 2012
Contents
Some of my best years were spent globetrotting on the company's dime as the International Marketing Manager for Bausch & Lomb, a Rochester-based optical company. B&L was best known for making high quality eyewear, microscopes, binoculars, and Ray-Bans. And for having won an Oscar in 1954 for developing CinemaScope.
Traveling was more fun when you didn't have to take your shoes off to board an airplane, and I now spend more time in the office than on the road. But I've never lost my fascination with marketing and sales promotion. The Ray-Ban story in "Marketing Insights" is an eye-opener. I'm sharing it because it demonstrates so vividly the symbiotic relationship between marketing and intelligently crafted pricing, how inseparable the two are.
Even in a tight market, maybe especially in a tight market, there are good reasons for a value-based pricing strategy. Everything can't be a nickel.
Hal Heindel
Unitac International Inc.
New Morning Flight Website
We said we might have our new website done for the November FlyBy, and here it is. Done, but being a true Content Management Site - a magazine rather than a catalog - never really finished. And that was the idea all along. We hope you'll stop in and look around. If you have time for a quick comment, up or down, we'd love to hear from you.
Marketing Insights
How an Italian eyewear manufacturer bought the U.S. Ray-Ban brand when the brand's owner was struggling and Ray-Bans were selling for a little as $29.00, withdrew the brand from the market for a year, then brought it back as a high-ticket, high fashion line that's the best selling brand of sunglasses in the world again.
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Tip of the Month
Customer Stationery Has this ever happened to you? A customer reorders letterheads but wants to change to a darker ink color or a different type of paper. They still have plenty of envelopes, so for now they only need letterheads. You record the change on the job jacket and deliver the order. All is well until two months later when the same customer runs out of envelopes. The change you marked on the job jacket for the letterheads? That never made it to the jacket for the envelopes. Somebody gets an earful, and you either have to rerun the envelopes or lower the price if you can persuade the customer to accept them as is. Could using Morning Flight have prevented that? Yes, on condition. The mechanism is there, but the change still has to be recorded in the customer's profile, and the next person to enter a stationery order for that customer has to remember to look it up. A good habit to get into. |
