Gaps in the product line?

[Edgecrusher]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

People love choice. They don't want "this is the one we decided you will like". Choice. Illusion of control.

ahahahahahahhah Yes because comsumers LOVE having to decide among 299 different choices of everything!... Marketers figured out a long time ago that giving too many choices actually got people to make no choice at all and choose not buy. People in general dont see it as freedom people see having to sift through lists of almost exactly the same products as tedious at best.

SD in a pretty smart marketing move has a website with pages that only contain a few pickups on each page instead of blasting you with 30 choices at once. This helps people disseminate through the options. Then in another smart move they offer shop floor customs. For those people who are informed and who dont mind combing around for minutia its easily available. Making a single page website of hundreds of options only pushes people away... literally.

 

[uOpt]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

Yes, that is the difference between 30 choices for the same thing and 2.

Offering vintage class soapbars (not hot soapbars) in two voices is giving the consumer a nice choice, an illusion of control and comfort.

APH1-ish and PG-ish soapbars make perfect sense. Especially since the majority of P90 guitars is hardtail and you want to lift the bass a bit in the neck.

 

[LtKojak]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

SD in a pretty smart marketing move has a website with pages that only contain a few pickups on each page instead of blasting you with 30 choices at once. This helps people disseminate through the options. Then in another smart move they offer shop floor customs. For those people who are informed and who dont mind combing around for minutia its easily available. Making a single page website of hundreds of options only pushes people away... literally.

As a person that works in Logistics, I get to manages Sales, Marketing and Distribution. I've been in this job since 1999, so some insight based on experience I can give.

Having said that, I COMPLETELY AGREE with Edgecrusher ON THIS.

It's a balancing act, and getting it right is more of an art than science. Too few choices loses sales. Too many choices loses even more!

HTH,

 

[blueman335]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

As much as I love P90's and would love to see a better assortment, they really are a niche market. I bet guitars with humbuckers and strat single coils outsell them 50 to 1.

This is where small boutique winders save the day by catering to these small markets. Though I sure wouldnt mind seeing SD do it.

Definitely a niche market for P-90's, but if you're going to do it, have a defined target audience and do it right. Give them what they want. As it is, I don't know who the 2 types of ceramic P-90s are supposed to appeal to. Not blues and jazz players. Double thick ceramic mags??? Most people buy Phat Cats expecting a biting Gibson A5 P-90 sound, which they don't get. Rather than correct those issues, these models seem to have been pushed off to the side to languish. Questionable designs and no clear idea on who they'd appeal to. It's a shame. With a little effort, it wouldn't take a lot, Duncan could be highly respected amongst P-90 fans. It doesn't seem like they know who they're making most of their P-90's for. They don't need dozens of new P-90's. But they should be targeting the guys who want to retrofit their LP's, SG's, 335's, and hollowbodies. Give them some great vintage P-90 tones. Offer a couple models with different mags, like they do with Customs and Jazz/A2P. Won't break the bank.

 

[treyhaislip]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

With all of the talk about medium output neck HB's and the Screamin Demon in the neck, maybe take the demon and swap the filister and hex screws (or go traditional filister/slug arrangement) and rename and market it as a neck pickup.

I would be in favor of that, could make a good HH set too in my mind because it sounds killer in both the neck and bridge position.

 

[Gearjoneser]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

Make the Brobucker a production pickup.

Just like Lollar, TV Jones, and GFS have done, Duncan needs a humbucker sized Filtertron. It would be nice if it were calibrated as a hotter bridge and nicely balanced neck.

 

[GilmourD]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

Make the Brobucker a production pickup.

Just like Lollar, TV Jones, and GFS have done, Duncan needs a humbucker sized Filtertron. It would be nice if it were calibrated as a hotter bridge and nicely balanced neck.

While I wouldn't be the target audience for that one I could see it being a seller.

Sent from my Moto X 2014 using Tapatalk

 

[DreX]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

ahahahahahahhah Yes because comsumers LOVE having to decide among 299 different choices of everything!... Marketers figured out a long time ago that giving too many choices actually got people to make no choice at all and choose not buy. People in general dont see it as freedom people see having to sift through lists of almost exactly the same products as tedious at best.

SD in a pretty smart marketing move has a website with pages that only contain a few pickups on each page instead of blasting you with 30 choices at once. This helps people disseminate through the options. Then in another smart move they offer shop floor customs. For those people who are informed and who dont mind combing around for minutia its easily available. Making a single page website of hundreds of options only pushes people away... literally.

It's not quite as simple as more choices bad, less choices good, it's more like an equation that factors in how sure the buyer is as to what they want, and then consequently how well the seller can assure the buyer, so when you go to SD or DiMarzio's or almost any boutique website, first they have the guitar type, Strat, humbucker, etc., because that choice is obvious. SD breaks it up further by "vintage output", "medium output" and "high output". At that point they win some people and lose some people, they win whoever thinks in terms of output level, and lose, or add some buyer stress to whoever thinks more in some other terms of tone, or who want "vintage hot", or "medium w/ good cleans", or are looking for a pickup that sounds like "red wine". How many pickups they can or can't offer really comes down to how effectively they can structure the choices.

There should really be a fork in the road somewhere early on to separate technically oriented customers who think in terms of specs, versus customers who think in whimsical terms who want to be told about how a certain pickup will transport them back to 1969.

DiMarzio's site has a great feature called "tech talk" where they (sometimes) get more into the technical distinctions, allowing a guitarist to better find exactly they want. A cynical person might say that SD and others shy away from "tech talk" so that guitarists can never be 100% sure they got what they want, and the doubt will lead to buying more pickups and "chasing the dragon" so to speak, but what I'd hope they would understand is that even if we find the perfect pickup, we will still buy more pickups. The "perfect pickup" is merely one destination on a long journey of "perfect pickups".

 

[Ptolemaeus]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

With all of the talk about medium output neck HB's and the Screamin Demon in the neck, maybe take the demon and swap the filister and hex screws (or go traditional filister/slug arrangement) and rename and market it as a neck pickup.

I'd be down for that. Honestly, the only reason I waited so long to try the Demon myself was because it is marketed as a bridge pickup and I couldn't get over that for whatever reason.

 

[GilmourD]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

It's not quite as simple as more choices bad, less choices good, it's more like an equation that factors in how sure the buyer is as to what they want, and then consequently how well the seller can assure the buyer, so when you go to SD or DiMarzio's or almost any boutique website, first they have the guitar type, Strat, humbucker, etc., because that choice is obvious. SD breaks it up further by "vintage output", "medium output" and "high output". At that point they win some people and lose some people, they win whoever thinks in terms of output level, and lose, or add some buyer stress to whoever thinks more in some other terms of tone, or who want "vintage hot", or "medium w/ good cleans", or are looking for a pickup that sounds like "red wine". How many pickups they can or can't offer really comes down to how effectively they can structure the choices.

There should really be a fork in the road somewhere early on to separate technically oriented customers who think in terms of specs, versus customers who think in whimsical terms who want to be told about how a certain pickup will transport them back to 1969.

DiMarzio's site has a great feature called "tech talk" where they (sometimes) get more into the technical distinctions, allowing a guitarist to better find exactly they want. A cynical person might say that SD and others shy away from "tech talk" so that guitarists can never be 100% sure they got what they want, and the doubt will lead to buying more pickups and "chasing the dragon" so to speak, but what I'd hope they would understand is that even if we find the perfect pickup, we will still buy more pickups. The "perfect pickup" is merely one destination on a long journey of "perfect pickups".

Even DiMarzio's tech talk doesn't really get into the EXACT reasons why a pickup sounds like it does.

In the end, it's all about the sound. Nobody's ever going to come up to me and be like "I love the way you can hear the 42 gauge wire in one coil and 43 gauge wire in the other coil of your hybrid." They're going to be like "Oh, man, I love that sweet midrange and the clarity!" if they even get into details of tone at all.

I think understanding why something could possibly help a pickup sound like it does is helpful, but in the end, aural references to tone are going to sell a pickup, not "So, you take the magnet wire and you stretch it with a tension of so and so lbs around the bobbin and the magnet... blah blah blah..."

All the technobabble will scare off anybody that sees it... Trust me, I'm a Trekkie who's read Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise and Star Trek: The Next Generation: Technical Manual a couple dozen times each and can explain most of it to ya, so I'd love all the technobabble, but it's best left far away from any marketing for the general populous.

 

[allbutromeo]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

I'd be down for that. Honestly, the only reason I waited so long to try the Demon myself was because it is marketed as a bridge pickup and I couldn't get over that for whatever reason.

I think that's the hang up for most people, it might not be what they want in the bridge, but would be perfect for them in the neck. However since it's designed for the bridge and marketed primarily as such many people may be deterred from trying it as a neck pickup

 

[uOpt]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

With all of the talk about medium output neck HB's and the Screamin Demon in the neck, maybe take the demon and swap the filister and hex screws (or go traditional filister/slug arrangement) and rename and market it as a neck pickup.

That is actually a good idea, but there is one problem. While this would give an excellent neck pickup for many applications a set with screamin' demon in both neck and bridge would be imbalanced. You can't really market it like that because people who believe in "calibrated sets" could walk away disappointed, especially with the weak sounding bridge demon.

The whole thing is misnamed anyway. There isn't anything either screaming nor demon about the screamin' demon. It is a very low output, high control pickup for large sound forming rigs. Not to mention long scale hardtail guitars when in the bridge position.

Some product naming sortout would also improve the Duncan product line.

 

[DreX]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

In the end, it's all about the sound. Nobody's ever going to come up to me and be like "I love the way you can hear the 42 gauge wire in one coil and 43 gauge wire in the other coil of your hybrid." They're going to be like "Oh, man, I love that sweet midrange and the clarity!" if they even get into details of tone at all.

The old "the audience can't tell" line, this applies to nearly everrrything. Some of us just play at home and are only out to amuse ourselves.

I think understanding why something could possibly help a pickup sound like it does is helpful, but in the end, aural references to tone are going to sell a pickup,

As Helmuth Lemme says in his book, pickups don't have a sound, they have "transfer characteristic", so there's really no good way to describe the sound of a pickup, because it's so dependent upon the sounds that's being "transferred", and that's not even to speak of the subjectivity of using adjectives in place of actual metrics.

not "So, you take the magnet wire and you stretch it with a tension of so and so lbs around the bobbin and the magnet... blah blah blah..."

That's why you have to appreciate that there's a difference between the electrical and performance properties of a component, and how you go about constructing it. If the tighter wind has an electrical implication, tell me what it is, not simply that it's wound tighter.

All the technobabble will scare off anybody that sees it... Trust me, I'm a Trekkie who's read Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise and Star Trek: The Next Generation: Technical Manual a couple dozen times each and can explain most of it to ya, so I'd love all the technobabble, but it's best left far away from any marketing for the general populous.

Then include both, like I suggested. For every person that's scared by it, another is insulted by the omission.

 

[GilmourD]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

Then include both, like I suggested. For every person that's scared by it, another is insulted by the omission.

I think your math is a bit off there. For every 50 people scared by it maybe one is insulted by the omission... I'm being generous there. And I'm a geek that wants to know.

But that's not the topic of this thread... So, do you have something on topic to contribute?

 

[DreX]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

I think your math is a bit off there. For every 50 people scared by it maybe one is insulted by the omission... I'm being generous there. And I'm a geek that wants to know.

It doesn't matter if the ratio is 1:1 or 1:50, they can still provide both the flowery language as well as technical fine points.

But that's not the topic of this thread... So, do you have something on topic to contribute?

It's very much on topic; someone suggested that the product line can't grow much larger because of problems relating to choice and selection.

 

[GilmourD]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

It doesn't matter if the ratio is 1:1 or 1:50, they can still provide both the flowery language as well as technical fine points.

Why spend money to have somebody write the copy when it's covered in many other places, like the book you're quoting everywhere now and won't gain any sales?

It's very much on topic; someone suggested that the product line can't grow much larger because of problems relating to choice and selection.

No, it's not on topic. We're discussing gaps in the product line. On topic would be a suggestion of a pickup that Duncan currently offers. Complaining about their marketing not catering to your individual unique needs is not on topic.

Stay on topic.

 

[DreX]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

Why spend money to have somebody write the copy when it's covered in many other places, like the book you're quoting everywhere now and won't gain any sales?

We're talking about providing the technical fine points of SD pickup, not information about how pickups work in general.

No, it's not on topic. We're discussing gaps in the product line. On topic would be a suggestion of a pickup that Duncan currently offers. Complaining about their marketing not catering to your individual unique needs is not on topic.

Stay on topic.

If I'm off topic then why do you continue to reply?

 

[GilmourD]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

We're talking about providing the technical fine points of SD pickup, not information about how pickups work in general.



If I'm off topic then why do you continue to reply?

Anyway...

Anybody else have any pickups they want that Duncan doesn't currently make?

 

[Funkfingers]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

pcorn:

When reading the DCR stats for the current SD P90 models, the apparent gap in the line is a bridge/Treble position model of approximately 11-12k. (i.e. Brobucker territory.) For me, the way to plug this "gap" has always been the SP90-3n.

I cannot imagine ever becoming interested in the Phat Cat model until it is offered with a plastic cover instead of a metal one.

 

[dominus]

Re: Gaps in the product line?

That is actually a good idea, but there is one problem. While this would give an excellent neck pickup for many applications a set with screamin' demon in both neck and bridge would be imbalanced. You can't really market it like that because people who believe in "calibrated sets" could walk away disappointed, especially with the weak sounding bridge demon.

Eh, PAFs were used in pairs and would have about the same output, so it may be less of an issue than you'd expect. Not to mention, some people run the Demon as a bridge pickup with a higher output neck:

I actually love the combo of the Liquifire in the neck with the Demon!

The whole thing is misnamed anyway. There isn't anything either screaming nor demon about the screamin' demon. It is a very low output, high control pickup for large sound forming rigs. Not to mention long scale hardtail guitars when in the bridge position.

Some product naming sortout would also improve the Duncan product line.

Definitely rename the Demon. Since George Lynch jumped ship they might as well take the time to rebrand the thing. It actually has less output than the Pearly Gates, which probably throws people. The first pickup I tried after the JB was the Demon and I was furious at the lack of output. Went to EMGs after that. Then was shocked when I picked up a used BC Rich Warlock with a Pearly Gates set that sounded incredible for black metal.

They did make the overwound Demon for Scott Ian though, maybe bring out a special run of that.