Varminterror
Member
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2016
- Messages
- 14,907
Effective advertising is always a part of a well run marketing campaign. My point is rather that advertising can’t be daft any longer, and cannot make unsubstantiated and even idiotic claims which passed in the past.
Using your example of the “Zombie trend,” market analysis at that time proved folks would buy Zombie genre products (and I’d refute the claim prices were jacked by 30%, as I bought literally tens of thousands of Zmax bullets at equivalent and even discounted prices compared to Vmax’s - often because the Zmax products were marketed and sold in big batches which weren’t as readily available in Vmax’s at the time). It was pretty straight forward - the prepper fad had begun and naturally, ammo and component manufacturers loved the idea of consumers purchasing massive stockpiles, but the image of someone hoarding ammo and water in a hole they dug through the wall of their basement was falling somewhere between mall ninja, tinfoil hat, and killdozer, as the perceived potential of a high volume, sustained civilian engagement where such stockpiles were pertinent was (and is) largely imaginary. Enter The Walking Dead TV series, presenting a context in which holding high inventory volume to repel zombie hoards made considerable sense. How does a suburbanite justify owning tens of thousands of rounds of ammo, a tricked out arsenal of more guns than they could carry and effectively deploy concurrently, and maybe a big grill guard and oversized tires on their pickup they drive 12 miles each morning on paved roads to their office job, and how do they justify range time and training…? Civil devolution into anarchy is an imagined paradigm, so if you’re going to go, go big, and if where you’re going is “crazy,” then go big —> Zombies.
So market analysis at that time would show 1) customers want it, 2) product development costs are nill, and 3) payback is ONLY dependent upon higher volume sales by offering higher volume products to broader market buyers, with the only costs being advertising overhead. Slam dunk. They didn’t have to sell 2700 bullet boxes to a small market of preppers or small market of competitors, they could sell it to millions of fans of The Walking Dead, who kinda thought maybe it might not be a bad idea to have a bunch of defensive options available at hand, even if they weren’t ready to go full tinfoil hat in their own bunkers quite yet.
