Great discussion on Behringer cooperation and support.
J\ufffdr\ufffdme, you apparently hit a "sweet spot" in Behringer's marketing timeline. Congratulations! They probably owe you much more than an FCB for the sales you promoted for them. But the effort on their part is commendable.
Re: 500 plus member here
The FCB1010 Yahoo group has 10,000 members, no typo, that's 10 thousand members and still growing. Except for a few visits from Jim Savery, the US Marketing guy, they didn't do much. Occasional comments on how to get a firmware update, the product sucked big-time initially, they lurked but did not contribute. They watched good-natured software developers write FREE code that Behringer should have provided WITH the product, I'm talking about the editors for setting system parameters. They watched as the same very generous people reverse-engineered their code to fix the bugs that Behringer was ignoring. Never a PUBLIC thank you to these good folks. I and others
openly suggested it would be nice of Behringer to recognize these people's efforts with at least simple kudos and amybe a T-shirt or "something". But NO!, Nichts, non, nada, nothing, nyet! And all that for 10,000 or more users in one mailing list. So I don't know if our devoted 500 has a chance or not.
I can tell you that if Behringer devoted a little effort to PR, hired a few of the active folks on these boards at least part time as go-betweens, ombudsmen, etc, and maintained an active and positive dialog with us users, then I would have a much easier time opening my wallet for their products in the future.
But as in the case of my DDX, where it and many other products were put onto the US market under allegedly false declarations to our saftey and trade commissions, that the products were UL approved, combined with a lack of effort to communicate with customers - it is hard to accept that they have genuine intentions. PERHAPS, they only have a
communications problem? They are Germans and not everyone speaks each other's language. But some effort would be nice and I don't read about them doing anything but putting out cheap products with "German design". I won't badger the Chinese manufacturing as "cheap" because I think they do an excellent job considering the prices they must meet. Quality could be better. but communication from corporate could be of mcuh higher quality that the improvements to manufacturing, in my opinion.
If I were grading the manufacturing quality, I would give them a "C", the American school note for acceptable. If I were grading the corporate communication quality, I would give them an "F", the American school note for failing.
If Behringer were smart, they would act on what they read in these groups and not just lurk. I think most users would easily pay an extra 10% or even 20% for confidence. It can't be bought either, it has to be earned.
The quick and easy way
for Behringer to earn confidence is to admit their previous shortcomings and jump into the water - start participating in these groups. They should publicly commend the people who contribute to their products success on these user groups and help users to use and further enhance their products and related applications with the generous feedback available on these forums. With excellent customer relations, they should be able to easily bump their sales 50%.
Reputation has killed many companies over the years. Fiat and Yugo were disasters in the US market because the companies earned bad reputations. These cars were sorely needed, gas prices were jumping and they had better mileage than any domestic brands. It costs a money and time to build a reputation, but it costs markets to loose it.
In the case of customer relations, silence is NOT golden.
Steve Meiers
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