Originally posted by photoptimist That's a very good point and maybe I'm a bit too harsh on marketing. And yet.....
The first open question is: can marketing increase sales sufficiently to offset the cost of marketing? If Ricoh added $1 million to the Pentax marketing budget, what would they get, and would it boost sales? Ricoh's per unit gross on Pentax equipment probably is not high once you take out retail mark-ups, shipping costs, warrantee costs, and costs of goods sold -- maybe a $100-$300 dollars per camera? That $1 million would need to boost sales by say 3,000 to 10,000 units just to break even. And for marketing to actually create say another $1 million in resources for R&D, that campaign would need to boost sales by say 6,000 to 20,000 cameras. Can the campaign do that? I feel like marketing is no longer seen by many (how many people use ad blockers or simply avert their eyes to advertising). A social media campaign may be inexpensive, but that only reaches people who already know about Pentax. It's not effective at reaching those who don't know Pentax exists. And the marketing that is noticed is not trusted and is likely to foster insults and derision. Does marketing still really work to convince non-beleivers?
The second open question remains whether marketing can increase sales more that can some other uses of those funds. That same $1 millio might make much of a difference if used to crete better AF, a new lens, or an update to the K-3. If Ricoh is thinking about adding $1 million to Pentax corporate budget, is it better to put that into marketing or engineering?
We can only speculate on the rationale for Ricoh's strategy. Are they stupid to ignore marketing or do they have data that shows that marketing is not cost-effective relative to other uses of the money?
Well, in this case I think they have been very poor on the marketing front, so poor it's laughable. The people I've met in person were barely competent, knew little about the things they were marketing except what could be read in the press release. A demo I went to was also laughably poor. And the latest episode is this interview with whoever it is from Japan at CP+ . I've seen far livelier sculpture. This just won't do.
So, before I'd recommend what you seem to be suggesting, spending an additional cool million (although this is reminding me of Austin Powers' evil nemesis, Dr. Evil, and "ONE MILLION DOLLARS!" )
, I would challenge Pentax to do whatever marketing they are currently doing at the current budget, only henceforth do it competently. Today, in 2018, they could indeed do a great deal more with the money they have. Think: more Youtube demo videos, double them on Vimeo, collaborate with this site and a couple of others, put someone in front of the cameras for interviews who can show more liveliness in front of them (that's a skill, actually...so, find that person in-house and use him/her), get the guys at the booths with the gear and train them on it, do a bit more brochur-ing (it's not expensive today!), get the ambassadors either out into the field or do some videos with them, and more. None of that would cost that million dollars.
Here's a concrete example of bad marketing: one of my best and oldest friends is an independent rep for Pentax. This extremely experienced salesperson
can't get samples to show the dealers in the territory. That's just completely pathetic. And, forget about a tech rep...good lord. And, I'm not really even talking about spreading the joy much past the faithful to begin with. Monochrome et al. do have a point, above. But why not solidify the base? And on the medium format side, Pentax could and should work to attract more sales, and they wouldn't be bumping up against Canon and Nikon.