Marketing to Hunters

It all depends on the product, and the price, and the claims.

Mathews: seems like a good bow, but there are bows out there that will kill a deer for a lot less.

Scent-lok: I've always been leery of this technology, the price is prohibitive, and a liberal dose of sodium bicarb works more reliably for me. I have a mismatched set of bibs and quad parka, both from Remington, both purchased in 2003, both from Walmart that have never seen a washing machine, and I can still have a doe 5 yards downwind and I'm invisible to her. They cost me less than $100, they are water repellent. They are insulated. There is no scent-reduction technology involved, just baking soda.

You're right that it's all right for these things to exist in the market, and it's our choice not to buy it, but when somebody goes and buys gobs of time and saturates the channel and you can't listen to a show without the host claiming that his whole hunting career hinges on the performance of this wonderful product. . . yeah, right. That's where the derision sets in. That's when I stop listening. The next time I hear some couch potato wannabe tell me that when he finally gets out off his butt and hunts one of these years he's going to own it, I'm sorry. Something inside me, my evil side, takes over. After the room clears, whoever I'm with has to make excuses for me and say something happened to me in the Jungle back in 67 and they carry me off. Nevermind the fact that I was 8 in 1967, they buy it.

One you did not mention is Thompson Center. It's a good product, but way too many TV hunters hunt with it, and you know it has nothing to do with it being a superior system. The Encore is just a @#$@# single shot rifle, and a sort of homely one at that. I don't appreciate it being rammed down my throat. TC is WAAAAY over-saturated to my liking. KYHillChick has started giving me my drinks in plastic cups, because they don't break the picture tube.

I've been home with the DVR a lot this Fall, and I have recorded a bunch of shows. The FF key is great, but what is surprising is how utterly empty some of these shows are. In one case, I had FF'd all the way to the :18 minute mark before anything remotely resembling content showed up. It ended up with :30 of show all wrapped around 0:00:20 of kill footage and the rest was either commerical or intro/outro.

. . . but this isn't any different than any other product category. P&G hit paydirt 50 years ago by putting blue inclusions in their laundry detergent. Product testing found that housewives were dead sure the wash was cleaner even though the little bits of blue were just harmless food coloring. The product came out as Oxydol. On the other hand.The last company I worked for had a flux-coated welding wire that women welder's loved, and the only difference between it and our cheaper brand was we kept a closer tolerance on the blue dye on the coating. It made the new batch the same color as the old batch. If they got hold of a mismatched stick, they'd think it had gone "stale." If you can capture the hearts and minds of the consumer by finding a need (or creating a need) and then filling it successfully, you've got a market.

I would like to think I'm well beyond that, but then I probably buy Hornady bullets, because I like the little red boxes. The world thinks I'm well beyond this too. I've recently fallen out of the prime demographic for marketing, and now I'm in the old fuds demo, 51 to . . . to. . . well let's call it "DEAD" It's funny, but a whole bunch of things stopped appealing to me. There's nothing in the shopping malls, nothing on TV, and nothing in the catalogs that even remotely attracts me. All of a sudden, I'm immune to marketing and it's sort of a relief. Then again, I kind of feel lonely now, because when the telemarketers call and they find out I'm 51, they always hang up quickly. And here I sit on my mountain of . . .stuff trying to figure out what to do with an unused bottle of Tinks 69, the String Tracker, and the Super Sling that I found stashed behind all those little red boxes I've been saving all these years.