And with an uninnovative and frankly shit workforce that thought they were better than everyone else.
Don't be silly. It'd clash with my sarong. Fact is the vast majority of you are as easily swayed by the marketeers as kids are - more so, even. Don't lie, how many of you have Ducati-branded clothing? Most of you I reckon, and you'll all say 'well that's to be expected'. But it's plain old advertising in exactly the same way a kid's Ducati pencil sharpener is, it's just that you see it as a fashion statement or even a necessity (believe me, it isn't, in either case). In fact I think the kids' stuff is more important than the grown-ups' stuff - us adults are already into the Ducati dream, targetting the kids ensures a future fan base.
Who uses the word Knapsack anymore!!!!??? My son comes in all the time with " Mother I need a new Knapsack!" "Where's my Knapsack?" I've only ever heard that in the song from that Musical ... Film ?? Ducati this is not getting down with the kids nobody says Knapsack .. I work in a school this is not a cool word! Or yes and
Proper marketing starts with a punter. You find out out what their needs and desires are. Then you create a product to satisfy that need - through giving a brief to your engineers and designers. The product will have "positioning" - it will fill a profitable space in the consumer's psyche. Once they have met the brief comes all the fun of the launch, the PR, the above the line advertising and then the below the line promotion. It's not simple. To dismiss marketing as sales and advertising betrays a deep ignorance about what marketing is. Bolting on an ad campaign to launch a crap and poorly thought out and executed product is not good marketing (or even marketing at all). When I say that the failure of the British car industry was as much about a failure of marketing as anything else, it was because the management (of which marketing is a part) didn't start with the punter, didn't produce clearly superior products with a clear positioning, or do anything else right. The Germans understood what people wanted. The Brits didn't. That the finished product was poorly and expensively made by a bolshy workforce didn't help. But the products they were supposed to be making were flawed from the start. Ditto the British motorcycle industry (until Bloor came along).
Very true. Oddly enough the old British car industry managed to produce the Mini, the Range Rover, the Rover SD1, the Triumph Dolomite (4 valve heads, anyone?), the RR Silver Shadow, the Cosworth F1 engine - all great designs in parts, most of them badly made, none of them updated enough in later years.
I don't think there has ever been much wrong with the competency of British automotive engineers. The domination of British F1 teams seems to underline this. So you have to assume they weren't given the right briefs to produce products from.
An old wing commander pal of mine is fond of telling me a story about an engineering company he used to work for. A rival German company sent them a hypodermic needle, boasting that it was the thinnest ever made. A month or two later the British company sent it back, no note, just the needle. Upon closer inspection they found another - british made - needle sitting inside theirs...
Pretty funny, I thought: i was on a plane yesterday and the French guy sitting next to me had a Ducati Corse sweatshirt thing - which was quite blingy. So eventually I said to him, "Have you got a Ducati?", thinking we might kick off a short Ducati discussion. He looked very sheepish and admitted that he hadn't. "Have you got a motorbike?" No he hadn't. He didn't ask me if I had a bike, and the conversation was clearly making him uncomfortable, so we canned it. I suppose that he just thought that Ducati and especially Ducati Corse was a cool brand and that by extension he looked cool wearing it. Making him admit that he didn't have a bike just pointed a finger to the gulf between what he was and what he wanted you to think he wasl I found this interesting. Of course, if he had been wearing a Ferrari sweatshirt, I'd not have asked him if he had a Ferrari; I'd just have assumed that he hadn't and was some sort of slightly sad supporter. So buying Ducati merchandise, if you don't have a Ducati seems to be a dangerous thing to do - you can quickly look like a pseud. You're bound to run into a real Ducati owner sooner or later - probably sooner.
We are a nation of exceptional engineers and innovators, we just can't seem to manufacter jack shit, the Japanese and the Germans have had to teach us how to make things properly.
