Carvin Still Gets It

This is a "Cotton Candy" Carvin B24 Brian Bromberg signature. It appeared on Carvin's Facebook page today. Allow me to explain to you why this is brilliant. Insofar as it directly relates to two of my favorite hobbies --- the guitar and the study of human motivation --- I am utterly fascinated by the diverse ways in which various musical instrument manufacturers "get" and don't get social media. Fender and Gibson, as examples, handle their Facebook pages almost identically. They have contests for free stuff, they occasionally feature a particular model, they show reader-contributed photos.

That all sounds fine but it's all tangential to the central purpose of marketing, which is convincing people to buy your product as soon as possible. The contests, in particular, seem like a less-than-brilliant idea to me. I've never warmed up to the idea of free-product contests, and this is why: you wind up with ten thousand disappointed people and one person who isn't going to give you any money. And all 10,001 of them have a lowered opinion of what your product is worth. Why should they pay for what some other mook just won? It's demotivating in the extreme.

Carvin, on the other hand, does Facebook right. I've talked about it before, but insofar as nobody from the industry is really paying attention, I'll cover it again. Every day, Carvin shows its buyers about twenty different custom guitars. Each of these guitars has an owner who is waiting for it. The photos tend to be of unusual, different, or highly-equipped models.

Remember what I said above about 10,001 people whose opinion of your product is lessened by a giveaway? Let's talk about what happens on the Carvin page. The guy (or girl) whose guitar is being shown gets to post "YEEEE-HA! This is MINE!" and share the photo out on his FB page. Everybody else gets to see a tangible example of a particular custom order combination.

The B24 "Cotton Candy" shown above is a great example. If you describe the guitar to someone, it sounds terrible. "Um, it's purple with a pink center." No thanks. But the actual guitar is certainly striking and they are almost certain to sell more of them now that people see that the color combo actually works. At the same time, they regularly put up photographs of less extreme stuff:

Same basic model, without the gingerbread. Two new owners, both of whom are going to be thrilled. And twenty new ideas going past the eyes of potential Carvin buyers every day. No giveaways, no promotion, no huckster business, just effective communication with both the existing owner base and the pool of prospective customers.

Now is the time in this post where I confess that I'm far from impartial when it comes to Carvin. Obviously, I'm a multiple customer of theirs and have been completely satisfied, but during the course of an order I currently have with them, the staff has gone above and beyond the call of duty to get it exactly right. And after I told Flock, their "artist rep", about my car accident, he tracked down Bromberg himself at NAMM and managed to come up with this:

You suppose Gibson Custom would have done the same for me with Jimmy Page?