Playing by Ear
Ritchie Fliegler didn’t start out playing guitar. His first instrument as a kid was violin. But somewhere along the way he picked up guitar, the same way he stumbled into marketing, and now Fender sales are humming because of it.
Fliegler is orchestrating the Fender Sounds of Summer road trip, a 21-city tour of three “Fender Roadhouse” vans decked out with displays on guitar history and a collection of 20 sample guitars that folks can just pick up and play.
That, in a nutshell, is the marketing strategy: Get folks to just pick up and play. Fender is targeting “Baby Boomers who left their guitars behind for mortgages and babies,” Fliegler says. It’s mid-life crisis marketing. The roadhouse vans and radio spots remind men of the fun they had playing in garage bands as teens and encourage them to share the hobby with their own kids.
Fliegler tells of a trucker making a delivery in New York’s Greenwich Village when he heard a Fender radio spot and was so moved that he drove straight to the nearest dealer and ran in to buy a guitar – double-parking his 18-wheeler and blocking traffic for half an hour.
The radio spots – casual reminiscences from professional musicians like Dick Dale and Sheryl Crow – are a first for Fender. The company broke its first consumer campaign last year, to build Fender’s image among hobbyists and gift-givers during the holidays. Fender offered retailers in 17 markets an extended tag on radio spots; 180 dealers bought in, two declined. (One later called Fliegler and begged to get in on the campaign when that trucker came dashing into his store.) Sales jumped 48 percent for participating dealers and 40 percent for non-participating dealers in the promotion markets. Fender will reprise the holiday effort in more markets this year via Inmark Services, Greenvale, NY.
For Sounds of Summer, Fender sends its vans to retail stores, malls, and beaches. “It’s our own version of the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile,” Fliegler says. One Roadhouse van has been commandeered by musician Gary Hoey to play at stores along the East Coast and sell his self-published CDs. “He wants to grassroots-market himself,” explains Fliegler.
The Fender exec has done some touring of his own. After a stint as a film editor for NBC making on-air promo spots, the Brooklyn-born Fliegler fell into a job repairing electric guitars at Guitar Lab in New York. “I learned how to build a guitar from scratch, and I wanted to be discovered by a rock star,” Fliegler says. He was, and toured with John Cale for 15 years. But Fliegler made more money on the road buying guitars in pawn shops, fixing them up, and reselling them at home in New York. So he shifted from the business of playing to the business of selling, working at Gibson and then London-based Marshall, an amplifier company, before joining Fender in 1995.
“As a 10-year-old, I dreamed of owning a Fender. Now I’m sitting in one of the driver’s seats. I pinch myself sometimes,” he says. Working with a handful of other guitar buffs “makes marketing to guitar players a slam dunk,” Fliegler says. “It’s like the movie Big: Take a 10-year-old boy and make him president of a toy company and people are amazed at how well he sells toys. It’s the same way for us – we know our customers, because they aren’t ‘those people,’ they’re us. When we bet on what focus groups will say, we can’t get anyone to take the wrong side of the bet. We all know how the results will come back.”
After all, the best marketers, like musicians, can play it by ear.
