Shaking a Brand’s Bad Reputation

I recently got a great deal on one of the best guitars I have ever played. It wasn’t a Gibson. It wasn’t a Fender. It wasn’t a Paul Reed Smith, Music Man, or an Ibanez. In fact, it wasn’t any of the brands you would expect to find at a Guitar Center or your local boutique guitar shop.

It was a First Act.

A brand traditionally found at such esteemed musical instrument retailers as Walmart and widely regarded as a manufacturer of cheap toy guitars.

However, unlike the guitars you would find at Walmart, which are made in China with the requisite mass-production specifications and quality control, my guitar was hand-crafted by a master luthier in First Act’s Somerville, Massachusetts workshop from premium wood and high-end parts. It was purchased from First Act’s Guitar Studio on Boylston Street in Boston (it’s available there and online—not in Walmart or any other brick and mortar shop). It’s a professional-quality instrument that plays like butter and sounds like a dream. And it carries a price-tag that reflects that quality and workmanship.

But to most guitarists I talk to about it, it’s still just a First Act…a discount store kid’s toy. A piece of junk. No self-respecting musician would play one, let alone drop that amount of money for one. Despite the quality of the instrument, the brand has a terrible reputation with the typical purchasers of premium guitars.

And that’s why I got it for 50% off of the retail price. These guitars just aren’t selling.

The company has certainly put forth an effort to eradicate this misconception—my guitar is part of series of premium limited edition instruments, it heavily promotes the fact that a number of well known artists play its custom guitars (including Brad Whitford from Aerosmith, Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick, and Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and it makes guitars that have been promoted by the likes of Adam Levine (Maroon 5), Paul Westerberg (The Replacements), and Slash. But it just can’t shake the stigma attached to its name.

First Act is clearly missing a critical insight regarding its target consumer. The scores of nay-sayers commenting on YouTube clips of people playing First Act guitars should be enough to clue its marketing team in to this. So what should it do to convince serious musicians that it makes a serious product?

Create a new brand.

First Act is a fantastic brand for entry level instruments of all kinds. It includes school band instruments, the entry-level guitars I mentioned, and an array of other instruments, electronics, and toys. The brand speaks to a very large market who are in need of exactly those things: inexpensive, beginner instruments. It does not, however, resonate with “real” guitarists.

This could be for a number of reasons. As a guitarist, there are definitely words other than “first act” that I would like to associate with my music. I was also not initially keen on seriously considering what I had known as a “Walmart brand.” In fact, I never would have known about how great the high-end guitars were if it weren’t for the Guitar Studio opening a block down the road from my wife’s office (I can’t pass-up going into a new guitar store).

So what would happen if First Act renamed its premium line to something more appropriate for professional instruments and started selling those guitars in Guitar Center or (even better) boutique guitar stores?

Guitarists aren’t afraid of new brands, but they do rely on historical experience with brand names.

Gibson built an empire on top of a name they made famous more than 75 years ago; Gibson guitars are certainly not as good as they used to be, but they still sell extremely well at a premium price due to the cachet attached to the name. Fender capitalizes on its historic brand name as well. Newer brands like Ibanez and Schecter have been very successful despite not having their guitars in the hands of musicians in rock’s golden age. I know I would certainly try a new, high-end guitar brand if it was readily available to me (that’s why msuicians go to guitar stores). And I would sure as hell purchase it if it were a quality instrument in my price point.

In summary, if you make a product that meets my needs and doesn’t scare me away, I’m probably going to buy it.

There are enumerable brands out there that have the same problem (quality product, bad reputation). A great example would be Hyundai cars. Another would be my alma mater and employer, Boston University. It also extends to categories like punk rock, pit bulls, and American beer.

There are, of course, many brands that manage to break free from the prejudices they face due to their history. From the mid 1990s to around 2001, Macintosh computers developed a poor reputation due to their aging and increasingly incapable operating systems. Macs went from being the computer to have in the 1980s to being absolutely crushed by Windows-based PCs in the 1990s. With the creation of Mac OS X and the return of Steve Jobs—and the sheer brilliance that seems to spread through some strange osmosis to his marketing and product development teams—Macs (and Apple products in general) are once again some of the trendiest, best selling computers on the market.

Despite our preconceptions of how much marketing plays a role in selling a product, it still comes down to quality and consumer need. Brands like First Act have a quality product, but consumers are confused about their need. They don’t need what they think the company offers; they need what the company actually does offer. First Act just has to figure out how to make them realize what that is.