• TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
    Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
    Join free Log in
    Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.

Fender Hires Guitar Center CEO

#83
BigOldHarry said:
You assume a great deal here. Having worked for a company that churns its executive staff about ever 5 years, what I've seen is that every CEO or President that comes on board wants to "Make his mark". It is almost certain that he was hired to make Fender more profitable, not to "build a better guitar" or "Create more US jobs". I would expect prices to go up on US instruments as well as a much more strict dealer network (Fender has a very very broad dealer base, which GC has never liked...)
Click to expand...

Don't forget, this guy is no dummy. He knows that producing junk is definitely not the way to go for maximizing profits. And how long would he last as CEO if he did? So like I said in my previous post, building a product of reasonable quality and selling it for a reasonable price is what this guy will do. It's what any CEO who knows what he's doing would do.


BigOldHarry said:
Look at it this way: Is GC a better place to buy gear today than it was 20 years ago? It may well be more profitable and efficient, but for us, the gear consumer, is it a better place? I say *no*. Absolutely not. The homogeneity between stores is Walmartesque, they have restricted pricing by refusing to compete between stores, they have purposefully expanded the franchise wherever any successful music retailers are located, ultimately restricting choice to the working musician. If one looks at GC today and is not pleased, you can expect the same at Fender. This guy is *not* going to change his style just because he runs a cool company...
Click to expand...

Well, GC may not be your cup of tea, and that's fine, but the traffic in and out of there is proof that they're successful at what they do. After all, if GC was not profitable, what choices would they have? Correct the conditions that are responsible for their lack of success, or close down their operation. So far they've been pretty successful, so their business model is sound, from an economic point of view. Whether or not one agrees with their business practices is another story altogether.
 
#84
i hate hearing this "make a new product" bs about fender. what 90% of fender buyers really want is for them to make them the way they used to: up to specs. What do you want from them? They dominate the market of basses, and have a huge portion of it with guitars. How many companies / people make a living copying what fender has made / continues to make.


If fender was to do something better, it would be with their bass amps. They should make a decent head with decent cabs for a reasonable price.

If the price can stay the same and QC goes up, I'll be happy.
 
#86
3wavylines said:
Yes, like Bill Gates at Microsoft, for instance....
Click to expand...

Rising swiftly to poisonous bait, as an aside I can assure you that college sophomore Bill Gates' ability to code a 4k BASIC interpreter in 8080 assembler, while commercially obviously a good start for his business career, hardly qualifies him as a "techie." Rather, he was an early adopter, and proved that his real talents lay in strategically icing out the competition. Sadly, spending time and untold treasure on making products that defeat or corrupt international standards has only harmed MSC in the long run. Don't ask me, ask the stock holders. Bill Gates is out, BTW, and Steve Jobs scrappy little computer company now is larger in sales and capitalization that MSC. Sad(?), but true.

Perhaps Fender's new CEO was in charge of GC when they used to wheel and deal a lot more.

In any case, what I really wanted to say is that for me, the most memorable post so far in this weird thread was one in which the poster reacted by stating that he needed to find "his noose." While baffling, it does raise the question "Who owns a noose and why?" The answer is left for the reader to work out.

Truthfully, I am not a big fan of CEOs as a whole. They tend to be egotists and liars, like most bosses--no shock there. However, a CEO from Fender's biggest customer might possibly spell a whole lot of "more of the same" at the very least, and "what's good for GC is good for Fender" at the worst.
 
#87
BigOldHarry said:
Look at it this way: Is GC a better place to buy gear today than it was 20 years ago? It may well be more profitable and efficient, but for us, the gear consumer, is it a better place? I say *no*. Absolutely not.
Click to expand...

I don't believe I have the same perspective. The first GC here in Tallahassee opened about 5 years ago, I think it was.

Before GC came to town, there were 3 or 4 little guitar shops here and the shopping prospects for a guitar or bass buyer was pretty dismal. Not many models to choose from. Very few in stock. Prices set at MSRP. And if you wanted to A/B Brand X and Brand Y, you probably couldn't, because you'd have to go to one store to find Brand X and a different store to find Brand Y.

Now that GC is here, they have more stuff in stock than all the old mom-n-pops in town combined ever did. You can go try a bunch of different guitars all at once, plugged into a pretty large variety of different rigs. And once you decide what you want to buy, if you want to buy it at GC, I've always gotten good prices. Sometimes by virtue of them having a good sale or coupon thing going on. Many times by having them price match Internet pricing. And, no, this policy has not stopped. I bought a Tascam MP3 Bass Trainer from GC about 6 weeks ago. They normally sell them for $199. I showed them an Internet site selling them for $140 and GC proceeded to sell me one for $140. They had it drop-shipped straight to my house.

So, at least for me, as a consumer, I would say GC is a much better place to buy gear than any of my local mom-n-pops have ever been. This is speaking as an overall statement. I have had specific instances where a local shop was better and occasions where GC didn't do well. But, like I said, overall, the pros with my local GC had outweighed the cons (when compared to my local mom-n-pops) by a HUGE margin.
 
#88
Quote from Bloomberg Businessweek:
"Guitar Center, Inc. was formerly known as The Vox Center and it changed its name in January 1969. The company was founded in 1959 and is headquartered in Westlake Village, California. As of October 9, 2007, Guitar Center, Inc. was taken private."

Mr. Larry E. Thomas (current position)
"Chief Executive Officer of Guitar Center Music Education Foundation..."
 
#90
Relayer71 said:
Plus, his strength has always been running the business and sales more than actually designing anything, no?
Click to expand...

I'm not so sure about that:

Joel on Software: My First BillG Review

... Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bull[****] him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.
Click to expand...
 
#91
Jim Carr said:
Rising swiftly to poisonous bait, as an aside I can assure you that college sophomore Bill Gates' ability to code a 4k BASIC interpreter in 8080 assembler, while commercially obviously a good start for his business career, hardly qualifies him as a "techie."
Click to expand...
Yes, very true.

Gates is a drop-out. Poster child for a guy with very little tech know-how with an army of experts behind him.

Whether you like Microsoft or not, they were obviously very successful under Gates. But the strength came from quashing any challengers.

With respect to running FMIC, technical expertise by the CEO isn't important. But that strategy of using competitive maneuvers in the markets seems to work well.

For example, I don't think Fender has really done much that's clever or innovative in amplification for a long time, and you might argue 'never' for bass amplification. But instead of trying to compete directly, they, like Microsoft, can see smaller companies doing good work and acquire them.

That seems to be the GC approach, too. Get bigger, merge with MF et al., squish out the little guys.

Something I really like about Fender is the lack of change over the years. They make basically the same things they ever did, and have always positioned themselves to be rather on the inexpensive, student-newbie side of things.

I imagine/hope the new guy will continue along the same lines.
 
#92
The past few years they've been putting out excellent basses.

The American Standards, Squire VM's, 6 string jazz, the Japanese re-issues, the 70's series, etc.

Let's hope they keep going in the right direction...
 
#94
For many years Thomas ran a large (not huge) successful retail chain whose main product was guitars. How could someone do this w/o becoming an expert on guitars?

He's now going to run another large successful corp that makes guitars. I would not be surprised if GC was Fender's single largest wholesale customer.

To me (for 25 years I was an in-house attroney for a corp way larger than GC and Fender combined), this looks like a good move for Fender - on paper. The proof will be in the pudding.
 
#98
IMHO, this is not a bad move at all by Fender, they could have done worse, much worse.
I don't think the quality of Fender will suffer at all any time soon, but I'm wondering about the future of Squier now :D

Given the quality of their latest products that rivals the MIM Fenders, will this continue to happen under the new management? Time will tell.
 
#100
blendermassacre said:
i hate hearing this "make a new product" bs about fender. what 90% of fender buyers really want is for them to make them the way they used to: up to specs. What do you want from them? They dominate the market of basses, and have a huge portion of it with guitars. How many companies / people make a living copying what fender has made / continues to make.
Click to expand...

I quite agree. But there is an old axiom in the business world: Grow or die. How can Fender "Grow" if it doesn't either expand it's customer bass, and a normal way to do that is to introduce new products. The funny thing about Fender - their "new" products never, NEVER sell as much as their tried and true standard strat/tele/P/J selection. Never. The biggest change that has worked "Business-wise" at Fender that I've seen is their wholesale off-shoring of production.


blendermassacre said:
If fender was to do something better, it would be with their bass amps. They should make a decent head with decent cabs for a reasonable price.

If the price can stay the same and QC goes up, I'll be happy.
Click to expand...

They have never made good bass amps - I think that's why they bought SWR. I don't know, but I'll be SWR sales now are pretty good. The haven't ruined SWR the way Tobias was ruined by Gibson... Of course, by the time Fender bought SWR the whole craze for the brand had come and gone... But I could live with a current SWR rig. It's not what I currently own, but I could do worse.
 

Latest posts

Top Bottom
Back