Wie die Preise zustandekommen wird wohl immer ein Rätsel bleiben,
Vielleicht probiert Gibson/Epi ja den alten Trick aus den 90ern:
(von reddit.com)
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Gibson's pricing strategies have actually been used as examples in business classes, and were the subject of a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal, and other places.
In the late 1980s or early 90s, I think, Gibson's then-ownership implemented a ton of new cost-efficiencies and managed to bring the retail price of brand-new Les Paul Standard down from something like $1,200 (1980s price), to something like $700-800, without compromising quality. As in, the metrics of quality and consistency were better, the reviews from guitar magazines, customers, and sponsored-players were equal or better-- there was no skepticism that they had pulled a Fender and cut corners: their cost-cutting was strictly by streamlining inventory, investing in better machining, cutting down on error-rates and waste with better management practices, etc. Not by cutting corners on sound, appearance, or playability.
This was all done in response to a new wave of high-quality guitars being offered at much lower prices, especially from Japanese companies like Yamaha and Ibanez. Gibson's guitars were, at the time, seen as old-fashioned and over-priced compared to the fast necks, double-locking tremolos, flashy shapes and color-schemes, multi-tap pickup options, 24-fret shred machines from the height of the hair metal era.
The thing is, the more they cut prices, the lower their sales numbers were. They had a loyal following among older and more affluent hobbyists, but the "kids" were still buying Yamahas and so on, even when Gibson was close to the same price. There was real fear that Gibson's days as a mass-market guitar-maker were over.
And so Gibson began a process of re-inventing their marketing as a boutique, "olde timey" specialty guitar-maker, and raised their prices to reflect lower sales-volume and a perception of exclusivity. Lo and behold, their sales-volume went up. So they raised prices again. And again. And the more they raised prices, the more guitars they sold, and the more market-share they took from similar-quality competitors.
Just so we are clear: these price-changes were
literally calling up their retailers, and telling them to take off the $700 price-tags, and replace them with $1,000 price-tags, then $1,200 price-tags, then $1,500 price-tags, and so on. They were literally selling the exact same guitars
faster, by raising their price. (Remember this was the pre-internet age, and people would go shopping for a new guitar maybe once every few years, and there was no easy way to compare prices except to drive to a bunch of different stores, so it was much easier to do things like this, back then).
This seemed to fly in the face of common-sense, not to mention basic theories of business and economics. It was literally front-page news on the Wall Street Journal, with a series of articles, in which Gibson execs were remarkably candid about how they finally concluded that the ideal price for a Les Paul was around $1,600 or something (remember, this was early 90's, pre-internet age, and business executives had little fear that their comments in the Wall Street Journal were going to "go viral" among guitar-players. It was an era where suits still used the business and financial press to brag to each other about their ability to exploit market-inefficiencies.)
The narrative explanation was basically that customers didn't see buying a Gibson as a value-proposition, they saw it as a status-symbol, and as a sort of heirloom/piece-of-history. Compared side-by-side with more value-competitive guitars, a Les Paul had fewer features, an old-fashioned appearance, less versatility, was heavier and harder play fast on, etc. But when put on a pedestal, as the kind of super-premium thing that you had to save up for, something that didn't even try to compete with the others... then it felt like buying a piece of Jimmy Page, or something. This was hailed as a genius move in the business-press, this "Gibson pricing model" of raising prices as a way to boost sales and value-perception.
Now, an important caveat to all this, that Gibson execs and the financial press missed out on (or omitted), was that all this took place right around the same time as a sea-change in musical tastes, just as Guns N Roses emerged as the biggest hair-metal band of them all, and also just as the tide began to turn to tastes like Nirvana and "alternative" rock, many of whom eschewed the neon-colored shred-machines in favor of weirder or older guitars.
But in any case, Gibson guitars are expensive, because they sell more guitars that way.
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