Friends,
Since this has come up again (how to satisfy a so-so market and/or make
it grow), I'll throw a few words your way. A company has to decide it's
first priority in making money. Is it going to serve a client base or
is going to develop a client base? Lionel's new releases might be a
half-hearted attempt to semi create a new market that they've never had
to do. They've relied on the great Lionel name and just rode along only
adding improvements as needed.
Go back 20-50 years and we found John Bortz in his basement converting
Kadee HO couplers to S. He was simply serving our scale (this client
base) nothing more. Before that time your local Montgomery Ward's sold
AF train sets in their catalog at a fair price--they were selling trains
and more importantly, developing a new client base. Every 7 yo kid was
a potential customer. If you look up the old catalog listing, they
normally had a chart showing what the train set would cost if purchased
piece by piece, while the whole set would cost $24.95 or similar. They
wanted those kids and dads to come back and buy those $15 log loaders.
One would think those trains would be with kids until the early teen
years when they either switched to HO or put them in the attic, thus
having about a ten year life cycle.
Well that world is largely gone and will likely never come back. Our
future will now be based on those 50 and older bunch with their unique
buying trends. Back just a few years ago SHS and to a lesser degree AM
ran ads in Classic Toy Trains and probably elsewhere to encourage a new
customer base. Unfortunately keeping that momentum going is costly and
may have not been economically worthwhile at the time. Any bean counter
would have seen the money going out long before he saw money coming back
in. On the other hand, without those costly ads S would have very
likely seen a loss of it's numbers. One must also consider that a
strong buyer one year, may now be unemployed, and financially
underwater; while others may have now retired with only SS or health
issues. If we look further, we see that trains might have a twenty year
life cycle where trains are purchased by a 55 year old guy making a
middle class income. By the time he turns 75, he's likely to be
considering downsizing to a retirement home or several dozen other
reasons to have left the consumer market. ( BTW, this is a good reason
to stuff vitamins into Bill Fraley, Jack Troxell and our other senior
friends).
So when you do contact Lionel remember to be kind and perhaps let them
think they thought of the improvements in their product. Nobody likes
to be told they did a bad job in approving a 'lacking' product design.
This is just like back in the quality Gilbert days when they did the
best they could, but were later told to cut back on quality, design time
and serve the temporary toy market. It's likely not the designer's
fault, it's the approval process that they must follow.
I was once told that an engineer for Daimler Benz had a easy job--he was
told to make the best car possible, while the engineer at Ford was told
to make a great car that lasts 100,000 miles, but not too much better!
Bob Werre
PhotoTraxx
PS, if you work for Ford, it wasn't my story, so save your rotten tomatoes!
On 12/26/11 3:47 PM, Brian Jackson wrote:
>
> I think the answer to this conundrum is implicit in Ed's response in
> terms of the S scale market. From Lionel's point of view, there simply
> isn't one. Our numbers are too small for Lionel to bother with. Let's
> remember that the USRA locomotives were never produced with scale
> wheels either. Ron Bashista once told me that scale locos represent 1
> in 10 of his sales.
>
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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