elephant wrote:

We have debated this many times - the BeoPlay versus Bang&Olufsen strategies, so I did not post this to re-ignate the debate, but rather for us all to smile at the humour -- and parallels from other than B&O !

Last year, there was talk about the ABC needing to chase a younger audience. I've also heard luminaries in the wine industry bemoan the average age of wine drinkers. Theatre companies and publishers fret over their demographics, too, but when they try to do something about it, disaster strikes.

There is nothing more embarrassing than watching marketers trying to attract the "yoof". They almost always end up making their client look like a middle-aged, newly divorced man with a comb-over trying to pick up hot chicks in a bar. I have seen more brands die in a desperate attempt to reinvent themselves as hip than I care to remember.

 

This may come as a surprise to many marketers, but young people grow up and eventually get older. 

The full article (from this Sunday morning's newspaper's Life Style magazine) is here: 

link

In my experience , the first product I saw designed where I work aimed at young people was bought by older people wanting to feel younger!

i personally started B&O with the Century in 1997 and then it was the MX tv, neither youth styled but not chintzy. I find the V1 to be a better evolution of the David Lewis neutrality than the other TVs until the Avant, which I'd consider if the back was designed better! 

At the local dealers Avant launch I was surprised by the age of those who attended . It was high and reflected how a tv used to be an investment . I saw a tv advertised on tv yesterday for the price of a beo4 and it was bigger than our television. It's not like the reassurance of looking at bottles of wine in the shop and finding one that's a bit more expensive , so it must be better. You just need to go into a shop selling TVs and look at how bad some are at what they do. You can't do that with B&O because you need to go into a specific shop. Should Beoplay be found in John Lewis shops? They were and the Beolit they sold was returned. They told me.

Humorous article! Of course, if the average age of your customer base is, say, 50 years old, and stays the same, that's one thing. If, however, you're like Cadillac was over here, where the average age of their customers went up a year every year...well, that isn't good. Given enough years all your customers will be dead and then where will you be? 😕

And there can be other disadvantages to chasing the "youf" market. In the US anyway, Mitsubishi cars really decided to go after the young market, to the extent of having their own financing firm underwrite loans to kids without established credit in order to sell more cars to the young market. They ate a lot of bad loans and repossessed a lot of cars and darned near drove themselves under here.

One other thing, with regards to determining what will be "cool" or "hip," is that it's about impossible to predict...very hard to predict what suddenly will catch people's attention. Like the Pet Rock, who in their right mind would ever think that would suddenly turn into a product that everyone thought was cool and funny? Same with things like Cabbage Patch dolls. I don't understand either of those.

Very funny and too true!

If twenty-something's had bags of cash and knew of B&O I'm quite sure they'd all be buying, but they don't to either.

I'm thirty, recently just kicked off my life with B&O, but have looked up to them for the best part of 15 years, since my dad brought his first B&O speakers.

I'm very lucky, I have a great well paid job in IT, which has only recently got me to the point where I can drop £18k on AV equipment.  This is a few and far between situation, most of my peers are out of this age bracket.  Also having a dad which had great interest in B&O allowed me to know about them and wait for the right point to buy in to them.

Its a simple fact that the products are luxury, it's only ever going to be sold to the top 1-2% in each country, irrespective of age.

Unfortunately people of my age are inclined to product compare, if you compare an Avant with a Samsung, on paper why would you buy an Avant?  Why would we buy a Moment?  Technically they are outdated and with poor quality software, it's a simple but true fact.

The thing which makes the small number of people do it is passion and the love of luxury products.  Others will buy cheaper, keep for 2-3 years and bin it or sell on eBay.  B&O customers want to keep their purchase for much longer or they lose far too much money, it has to outlive 2 or 3 standard purchases to make financial sense.

Why would the "yoof" of today (myself included) want a product which by today's standard isn't technically top end, with poor software, which I have to keep for 8-10 years to make financial sense.  It doesn't add up!

B&O need to employ some younger design teams, with new/more/younger software developers, and simply improve the products, they need to be as good as the best or even better.

All of my comments above of course relate to software and technical components, not the product quality or design!  Quality and designs are amazing!