GE Lighting and Grainger … Growing Lighting Business Together
David Gordon
Posted On June 15, 2010
When you see this ad, what do you think?
Grainger and GE Lighting ran this ad in the March issue of Purchasing.
Some things to ponder …
- What are you doing to reach your end-customer (the one who writes the check for the project)?
- As a manufacturer
- How do you / should you decide which distributors to proactively develop the market with?
- Where are you (and with whom) investing your marketing dollars?
- As a distributor
- Are you using a broader definition of marketing (vs. promotions and events)?
- Are you generating demand throughout your marketplace or only focused on existing customers?
- Do you think all prospects in your market know you or your salespeople? If they wanted to buy, could they (i.e. online)?
- Are you a marketer or a sales organization?
So, when you look at the ad, what did you think?
2 Comments
For everyone out there in distributor land, let me translate this message for you.
Memo
To: Our friends and partners in Electrical Distributor-land
Greetings,
We hope you and your company are doing well. We wanted to thank you for all the market creation work you have done on our behalf for these many years. We really appreciate all the work you did to help us over the past many years. We decided to help Grainger position to “service” the market you helped us build.
Oh, we know that Grainger has yet to really “stir the pot of market creation” for anything they sell, but this full page spread makes us look good for the boys on Wall Street. Who knows, we may be mentioned by some analyst as really understanding distributor trends.
Again, many thanks. We hope you will continue to solve problems on our behalf and bust your butts to convert from the other two lighting companies. Please stop by our hospitality next year at NAED, we would like to give you a really nice trinket for your efforts.
Have a nice rest of your life…
Your Buddy and Pal
In the above comment you forgot to say “this full page spread makes us look good for the boys on Wall Street on how well we sell cheap Chinese products that we don’t even make (only our name is sold and licensed) for maximum returns.”
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