CompuServe Messages

Brian: I agree with some of your points. But I can tell you as someone who has been engaged in advertising and marketing for a long time (25yrs) that CBM could have EASILY afforded a "signficant" print campaign targeted at the "prosumer" (not CONsumer) video market. They wasted almost 15 million on a pointless television campaign that got them almost zero sales (they sold 55,000 Amiga 500's the year they did "tv"). For the same amount of money they could have bought several YEARS of targeted print and direct mail selling and gotten a huge US installed base of folk who were actually using their machines above the hobbyist level. This would have caused a flood of software and peripherals to be created which would have further enriched the installed base. Sure Commondore has done "ok" in the video market –and they didn't even try! Think of how well they could have done with even reasonably competent marketing? There are 20+ million video camera owners in the USA. About 15% of them have "high end" vcr's and cameras. Every one of those folk are candidates for an Amiga with the right software bundle (and a simple IR interface). With a decent effort and a few million a year in real advertising and marketing, CBM could have cemented the Amiga into that prosumer market segment as the general purpose editing/digitizing/titling/effects machine. A hunderd grand a month in print ads in selected video publications (repeatedly, not just once or twice) and a half million to a million in direct mail annually. It would have taken a few years to "stick" but it would have stuck and paid off bigtime. Commodore was/is unwilling to think about more than one-quarter at a time in their "marketing". When they did spend significant money, they did exactly the WRONG thing –they tried to buy the mass market with a lame campaign that cost them too much and did nothing except confuse people. –Redmond