Kroger is on the verge of buying Albertsons, who owns Safeway.
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Older Audiences & Advertiser Appeal (For All Markets)
- Thread starter Kelly A
- Start date
Strangely, Sears was able to sell the brand names Craftsman, Die Hard (and maybe Kenmore) for big bucks in the past few years, even though there's no Craftsman or Die Hard or Kenmore factory, just a set of specs for contract manufacturing.
In ~2008, Philips stated that there was no brand loyalty and proceeded to license 2 companies to make and market Philips branded products (mostly TVs).
I'm actually really happy with the Funai OEM'd CE items (DVD/Blu-ray recorders/players, TVs - CRT/LCD), part of the challenge buying Funai products is keeping up with what brand names they are currently using.
Kirk Bayne
In ~2008, Philips stated that there was no brand loyalty and proceeded to license 2 companies to make and market Philips branded products (mostly TVs).
I'm actually really happy with the Funai OEM'd CE items (DVD/Blu-ray recorders/players, TVs - CRT/LCD), part of the challenge buying Funai products is keeping up with what brand names they are currently using.
Kirk Bayne
I have 2 Toshiba DVD recorders that were actually manufactured by Funai. I found them both at Goodwill and they still work great. Those are next to impossible to find now except used.
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That's not the way advertisers look at potential consumers. The evaluation is based on how much it costs to make a sale.
The older a consumer is (in the overwhelming average), the more sales messages are required to earn a purchase. At some point, the cost of the sale is greater than the sale price, and it is not worthwhile. So, for most broad-spectrum consumer products and services, advertising targeting seniors is not productive.
So, as you say, there is nothing radio can do about that as the decisions come from the often deeply researched marketing departments at advertisers.
That is a good observation. Watching the "Big Game" I saw a variety of ads for brands that are relatively new and even for products and services that were not even created a decade ago. The market is moving much faster.
Brand loyalty is not an all-or-nothing proposition. But it does become more entrenched as we age. Not entirely, and not all the same. But it for darned sure is there. And the cost to overcome it is just too steep for some.
Craftsman was mentioned above. My dad was a walking ambassador for their brand of hand tools back in the day. Raved about taking a broken hammer to Sears and walking out no questions asked with a new one.
Had he lived long enough to see today’s situation? He wouldn’t have raved, that’s for sure. But would he buy them out of brand loyalty? I think so. He was pretty entrenched and tools mattered to him.
Craftsman was mentioned above. My dad was a walking ambassador for their brand of hand tools back in the day. Raved about taking a broken hammer to Sears and walking out no questions asked with a new one.
Had he lived long enough to see today’s situation? He wouldn’t have raved, that’s for sure. But would he buy them out of brand loyalty? I think so. He was pretty entrenched and tools mattered to him.
Bethenny Frankel reveals ‘shocking’ truth about luxury brands
Entrepreneur and philanthropist Bethenny Frankel discusses her viral social media series where she reveals "shocking" comparisons of luxury cosmetics versus their drugstore dupes.
Everything has to meet (USA) Gov standards (one of my [off brand] DVD players is FDA certified though - if I ever get really hungry).
Kirk Bayne
And a lot of that is caused by a consumer society being forced to subscription models. Any thought of brand loyalty is quickly replaced by the latest and greatest app/subscription.
I was watching a music video on Spotify earlier today and at the end appeared "Copyright 2023 RCA Nashville, a division of Sony." I had no idea RCA was just a Sony brand now! Of course, I can't think of a reason to prefer one label over another.
Black & Decker, Bostitch, Craftsman, DeWalt, Porter-Cable, and Stanley are all now owned by the company. Tools are tools regardless of whose brand name is printed on the handle.
RCA split in a few ways. What you saw was what would have been RCA Records. GE sold that to the German media group Bertelsmann in 1987. Sony and Bertelsmann merged in 2004, forming Sony BMG, which was renamed Sony Music Entertainment in 2008.
The RCA consumer electronics line was sold to Thomson in 1988 and the semiconductor unit to Harris.
Most mechanics I know value tools by where they are made, as opposed to the brand. Snap-On seems to be an outlier. a lot of them stick by Snap-On, although the mechanic I've worked with the most says that the origin of manufacture is more important than a brand name.
With the rise of the internet, where opinions on every brand and type of product can be easily found and perused, I think the average consumer is a bit more savvy about quality and quality-vs.-cost than they may have been 50 years ago. And this would include the over 50's, who were 30 when the internet kicked in during the mid-to-late 1990s. Older people have more access to a wide range of info than they did in 1965.
And are way less technophobic than legend would have. Want grandma to adopt technology? Give her grandkids and an iPad. She'll have FaceTime mastered in a heartbeat. The rest is easy.
Rush L. was not polite to people, he was a blowhard, he told people not to use their own brains and common sense, because "I will do your thinking for you!" I was taught not to speak ill of the dead, but I must make an exception. Limbaugh was not a nice person. He attacked a young lady who was testifying at a govt hearing involving birth control and related issues at colleges. He called her a whore and a slut. He went on to say that if the govt gets involved in this issue and has to pay for it, then this young lady should have to make porn films to show the public that the tax payers are getting their moneys worth.
At the time this young lady was about my own daughter's age, and I realized that Limbaugh has just given permission for every middle aged male listener to call any twenty something female they disagree with the above mentioned insults.
He lost a few stations over it, and supposedly he apologized, but for me it just didn't fly. If my station had carried his show, and I was running it, his program would have been history...NO money is worth this!
You're absolutely correct! Back in the 80's when KMPC 710 here in SoCal was still playing MOR music (the station at the time was supposedly targeting 50 plus and older). Rumor has it that requests were made to play songs from Linda Ronstadt's three incredible Standards albums which were backed up by the great Nelson Riddle and His Orchestra. The station supposedly refused, saying that "their" listeners either didn't like Ronstadt or didn't even know who she was so they couldn't take a chance, because their station was, after all, "nostalgia". If this was true, a decision like that was sheer stupidity. Their audience would have loved her tunes.
Those three albums are, in fact, magnificent. It might help to have a great producer like George Massenburg, but those records are truly works of musical art.
The words “rumor” and “supposedly” are problematic.
But that aside, KMPC in the 80s was a station that played old records. I agree that the Ronstadt albums were tremendous, but in the same way KRTH wouldn’t play a current artist’s new albums of 80s and 90s covers, no matter how faithful the arrangements were to the originals, KMPC was not going to play the then-recent Ronstadt albums.
GE purchased RCA back in the day for the sheer purpose of eliminating an arch competitor. They fully intended to destroy RCA and they did. Generally the only thing that remains is the RCA trademark which is wholly owned by GE. It's licensed out to manufacturers of extremely cheap electronics. (Much the same way that KLH, who made high quality electronics back in the 50's and 60's is now licensed out to cheap electronics products manufacturers.)
Sony, fortunately for traditions sake, owns and maintains the seperate RCA labeled music library. For decades CBS/Columbia and RCA were major music and recording competitors, now they're all the same company! Who could have imagined that?
I understand Michael, but I still think it was a stupid decision if it was true. I didn't listen to KMPC enough to know whether they played her tunes or not. My "info" was based on an obscure article I read somewhere, so I don't know whether or not this really happened. All I was trying to do was express my humble opinion that even though a given station was supposed to be "Nostalgia" and therefore artist driven, I don't think it would have hurt to be "music" driven in this instance. Just my 2 cents.
I could make a further comment that beginning in the 60's/70's and continuing to the present day a huge percentage of pop music is "singer/songwriter" or in other words the musical talent is recording/performing their own material. This was not so in the 40's and 50's where most pop artists were performing tunes written by just songwriters. I guess what I really meant is that most music played on MOR formatted stations were in effect "covers" anyway, so why not add a compatible contemporary artist to the mix?
Because by the time that music boiled down to the Nostaglia/Adult Standards format of the 1980s, it was very specific, extremely well-researched and they were playing carefully chosen versions of those songs. In most cases, the biggest hit version. It essentially was, by that point, an oldies format with a fairly tight list.
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