Marketing Innovation
Ernie Ball did not create anything new—he simply saw a demand and improved upon existing products and found ways to better fulfill market demands. By the early 1970s he took the company global by establishing distributors in Europe and Asia. Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, kirk Hammett and other rock icons were stringing up Slinkys, a trend that continues into the present, making Ernie Ball the second biggest string manufacturer in the country. He was unorthodox in his management methods, disregarding market surveys, preferring instead to test products in the marketplace to see if they would succeed. He regarded profit-and-loss as necessary evils and trusted his instincts. In the early eighties the company bought the Music Man Company, expanding into the production of high quality guitars, basses and amplifiers with Leo Fender making the instruments and Tom Walker building amps. Ball, along with former Fender employee, George Fullerton, was instrumental in the development of the first modern acoustic bass guitar, introduced under the Earthwood brand in 1972. Although unsuccessful, surviving models are highly collectable. In 1985, the company was moved to a new facility in San Luis Obispo and remained there with all of it operations until early 2003, when the company relocated its string manufacturing to Southern California’s Riverside County. Under his leadership it grossed more than $40 million per annum. The company established an annual Battle of the Bands contest and participated in other trade events nationwide.
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Famous quotes containing the word innovation:
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)