Category: Marketing / Advertising

Not Surprising

Marketing / Advertising, The Gun Thing

There’s another one of those (I suspect) A.I. videos talking about the ten guns that are sitting unsold on shelves, and have been almost since their introduction to the market.

There are a couple of obvious losers — the Remington R51 9mm, for example, which was the harbinger of the downfall of the once-great company because it was a shoddy, badly-engineered piece of junk (very much like the company).

The next were those which somehow thought that an expensive 5.7mm bullet was just the thing that the market wanted, and tied that belief to their launch in $900+ guns that were too bulky to carry and too flimsy to be serious rifles.  They were, in essence, expensive range toys, and in the post-Covid years were precisely what the market did not need.

In fact, “expensive range toys” is a pretty good description of most of these ten stinkers.  In saner times, one would have hoped that cooler heads in Marketing would have figured out that mistake;  but there weren’t sane times, anything but.  They were the early Biden-Covid years, when the feral ATF, FBI and Department of Justice looked for any excuse to deny gun owners guns, take away their guns and criminalize gun owners.  And the Covid-era panic buying of toilet paper (FFS) was a perfect companion to the rush to buy guns, any guns, by people who didn’t know anything about guns, where price hikes followed shortage as inevitably as night follows day, where dropping $3,000 on a semi-auto piece of crap seemed an obvious ploy to increase profits, or to plug up a gap in a gun manufacturer’s product portfolio.

Meanwhile, the real gun buyers — guys like most Readers of this website — didn’t fall for any of this nonsense, and spent out money (if we did at all) on proven guns and, while gritting our teeth, insanely-expensive ammo.

Then the waters started to recede, Covid panic ended, and suddenly gun dealers were confronted with a plethora of guns to be sold on consignment, as the panic buyers turned into gun-free zones as before.  Many gun stores which previously had not offered consignment sales now realized that there was money to be made in the commission business as a way of keeping the doors open.

Of course, the idiots who’d purchased awful guns like  like our top ten rascals in the video handed in their geegaws, and now the dealers were left with cluttered shelves full of expensive range toys which nobody wanted.

So when the godless gun-grabbers of the Biden Party lost the White House, the gun market as a whole cooled off, as always happens when the Happy Times return and people are no longer thinking they need to gun up in case of you-know-what.  It happened after Obama was term-limited out of office and conservative voters made sure that Hillary Fucking Clinton didn’t get to play her little Commie reindeer games, and one would have thought that gun manufacturers would have learned their lesson, but of course they didn’t because that has to be the only reason they launched those terrible guns.

It’s funny;  I looked at all the guns on the list, and realized that I, as big a gun lover as exists anywhere in the universe, wouldn’t be interested in any single one of them now, even as a gift let alone at their severely-discounted-but-still-insane prices.

Screw that, and them.

(Read the comments from @reaver6666 in the video’s comments for an excellent overview of the products’ common failings.)

By the way, there’s another A.I. crappy that breathlessly announces that these are the 12 guns you can buy on the cheap.  Yeah, right.

That Paywall Thing

Business, Marketing / Advertising

I received a couple of emails from Readers about my earlier piece on creeping paywalls, and indeed Jamie Wilson at PJMedia wrote a very polite rebuttal thereof.

Like I said in my earlier post, I understand exactly how this all works.

I mean, as someone who has been trying to support himself by writing for the past two decades, I understand completely the need for being paid for one’s work.  I have no issue with that.

The problem I do have is that the cost of paywalls seems to be out of line with the product being offered.  Back when TIME Magazine was actually worth reading, I used to give TIME subs as Christmas- or birthday gifts to friends and family.  I don’t remember the cost, but it was something like $25 per annum — and that for a full magazine on a large number of topics of interest, not just politics, delivered weekly.

Compared to that, most online publications today fall woefully short.  Even Cathy Gyngell’s excellent TCW from the UK doesn’t compare, and sad to say, neither does the PJMedia complex, nor even Breitbart.  Don’t get me wrong:  I enjoy at that conservative stuff, oh yes I do.  But my life isn’t just politics, as even a cursory look at my blog will show, and thus I can find little good reason to spend what seems to be an awful lot of money on what is, after all, a niche interest.

To properly entertain myself, I once worked out that I’d have to spend about $300 a month on subs.  Won’t do it, even if I could afford it.  And when I could afford it, I could certainly afford to spend $90 per annum on Britain’s Country Life magazine, about $100 per annum on various gun magazines, and $30 per annum on pubs like Foreign Interest and Bill Buckley’s National Review (back when it was also worth reading), and so on.  All told, that’s much less than $300… a year.

When today’s online media can resolve the issue with micropayments, I would have no problem paying for Jamie’s or Stephen Green’s articles, as long as they cost me pennies.  Hell, I sell my historical novels (usually, about 100,000 words or so) for a couple of dollars each on Amazon, and each one might have taken me about a full year to write, with all the research involved.  A journalist/writer may charge, say, a dollar a word;  but the publication needs to sell it to a reader for fractions of pennies — something which seems to have escaped our modern publications.

Right now, they don’t.  Yes, a PJMedia sub doesn’t cost that much — but when they start writing content which can rival that of, say, a traditional daily newspaper (like the Daily Telegraph ) in terms of its breadth, I’ll think about it.  Until then, no.

Note, by the way, that Jamie Wilson’s article is accessed through an Internet archive link because when I originally tried to get to it, I was blocked.

It’s Not Hyperbole

Food & Drink, Marketing / Advertising, Patriotism, Trades

When I first referred to Jeremy Clarkson as “The Greatest Living Englishman”, it started off as a nod to his unflinching honesty when it came to everything he looked at, such as his (non-)review of some Vauxhall car model back in the 1990s:  “If they’re not going to bother to make an interesting car, I’m not going to bother to review it.”

That caused Big Business (in this case, Vauxhall’s then-parent company General Motors) to go apeshit, because that’s not the way car reviewers are supposed to behave.

It’s that same unflinching honesty that he displayed in his first bumbling efforts at farming which turned his Clarkson’s Farm TV show into a runaway smash hit, and along the way almost single-handedly changed the way the British regard both food and the farmers who produce it.

So when he turned that same agricultural ignorance towards brewing beer — simply because he had a barn full of unsold barley which he needed to sell — one might think that it was just another celebrity using their name to sell a product.

In this case, one would be not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong.  And if you want to see a case study in marketing that, in hindsight, never had a chance of failing, then I implore you to watch this video.

Time and time again, “the experts” believed that Clarkson was making a mistake, and every single time he proved them not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

He turned a few thousand pounds’ worth of unsold barley into a £75 million company, and in the process, changed the way British people think about farming, about beer and about the people who farm and the people who brew beer.

And he did it all with his usual unflinching honesty and openness, which gave the lie to the usual corporate veneer of respectability and care for both their employees and their customers.

Which is why he truly is the Greatest Living Englishman.

I can’t wait to try it the next time I go over to Britishland.

Stupid Money

Drive Time, Marketing / Advertising, The Gun Thing

Via Insty (again), I see that Overfinch has crafted a line of bespoke Range Rovers in Holland & Holland livery:

The 2025 Range Rover Holland & Holland Overfinch’s interior is much more overtly extravagant, though Range Rover’s minimalist form language still dominates. Most surfaces are wrapped in Bridge of Weir leather, and those that are not are instead covered with open-pore French walnut veneer or real metal. The stainless-steel inserts in the doors feature the same engraved scroll work as on the “Royal” shotguns, the engraved diamonds embedded in the veneers in the doors echo those on the guns’ stocks, and the Holland & Holland crest is inlaid on the front and rear center consoles, the latter housing a Champagne cooler and a pair of Champagne flutes.

The leather seats feature a unique quilting pattern that also echoes the Holland & Holland diamond motif and features illustrations of game birds stitched into the backrests. In the duo-tone colorway the front seats are trimmed mainly in Harris Green and the rears mainly in London Tan.

Sounds like something an Arab oil sheikh would want to putter around his Scottish estate in, playing a Laird.  Still, I like that interior.

Of course, from the outside the thing is 2025 Rolls-Royce-level Fugly:

…but not as ugly as its price of $650,000.

To put it into perspective, that’s just over the price of three new H&H Royal and a couple-three of their secondhand Royal shotguns.

Lovely as all get-out, but not even with a lottery winning would I be tempted.  And that’s by any of them:  the H&H Range Rover or the H&H shotguns, which taken as the package above would set you back about a million bucks.

Maybe the parvenu status-seekers of today’s ultra-wealthy set would be tempted by such blatant brand-harvesting… hence the title of this post.

As for myself (given a lottery winning as above), my choices are below the fold. Read more