juststartingout said:
When I confronted him about it, he said, it's not what time or materials it took, it's what the market would bear for it. I learned a lot about marketting from him. The other thing that stuck with me is that if you price things too low, people won't pick it up. Price it higher, and everyone will look at it and want one.
Yeah, the sort of "monkey see, monkey do" school of marketing. On top of that, Gibson is doing something known as "The Sausage Game" in business schools. Of course, they are not alone in this.
I once worked for a really shrewd fellow who went into a competitive field and succeeded extremely well. His only secret was that when he started from scratch, he researched his market and priced his services 50% above the next most expensive competitor. In reality, he was providing totally substandard value by even the standards of much cheaper competitors, but nobody seemed to care, even in the presence of glaring evidence. He charged outlandish prices and that
ipso facto made him "the best," even if his stumblebum dopefiend employees consistently did crap work for his rich customers.
I never ceased to be utterly astonished at what he got away with, and how he prospered. What made it worse was that this was not trivial stuff like guitars, but in fact potentially matters of life and death. In spite of everything, he virtually never lost a customer and even got referrals. To me, it was like some weird dream in which everything is backwards. When he reached his high-water mark, he sold the business at a huge figure and the whole thing went down the drain in six months when more conventional businessmen took it over.
Maybe this was just "business," but I reasonably regarded him as a crook and his customers fools.
If you want a Gibson, then pay their price, if not, get something else. If you want perfection, get it custom built.
It's not so much perfection I'd like to see, but value. The very cheap Gibson instruments are often decent dollar values, even if they're cobby. Their expensive stuff is demonstrably a relative rip-off. I see excellent workmanship in a lot of import instruments, but that's not always the most important thing in itself. It's just that at Gibson's MSRPs of US$3000-US$5000, one would reasonably expect superb workmanship and the absolutely finest materials. They're just not there on Gibsons.
So, the
only answer to the original question of why Gibsons cost so much is that there are people who, contrary to all common sense, will pay the price.
It's a sorry answer, but it's the only one we've been able to come up with.
And it's not surprising that I tend to view things the way I did with that old employer and his stupid customers.
