Fender Entra Com a "Customização" E o Digital Para Satisfazer Os Seus Consumidores

Guitar Giant Goes Custom And Digital To Please The World's Players

Fender CEO Andy Mooney

When Fender Musical Instruments Corporation hired CEO Andy Mooney in the summer of 2015, he was given a mandate to stoke the company’s core business while launching new digital products.

The stakes are high, given the legacy of the brand. Even those who know little about guitars are familiar with Fender products, whether they realize it or not. Rock and roll God Jimi Hendrix was a committed user of Fender instruments, as have been artists like Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen, among countless others. Last year the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company generated nearly $500 million in revenue—50% of which came from instruments and amplifiers, another 20% from musical accessories. Annual growth clocks in at between 5% and 10%, Mooney claims.

The partly burnt 1965 Fender Stratocaster guitar which the late Jimi Hendrix set alight during a concert at the London Astoria in 1967, is displayed in London Thursday July 24, 2008. (AP Photo / Max Nash)

In taking on the task of revamping Fender’s offerings, Mooney, who was most recently CEO of surf and snowboard apparel company Quicksilver and previously chaired the Walt Disney Company after spending 20 years at Nike, is refocusing on the wants and needs of experienced musicians as well as students.

Most ambitious, perhaps, is Fender’s plan to launch a subscription-based guitar learning system in late spring which will include 500 hours of theory and guitar practice content for any device, priced at $99 per year. Says Mooney: “When we looked at the overall market, what’s interesting is the lessons side of the business is roughly double the size of the sale of new instrument business. You couple that with the fact that 90% of guitarists abandon the instrument in the first few months, if not the first year at the latest. We felt there was a commercial opportunity to develop the brand in the digital learning space because clearly the trends in learning are heading towards digital, as are many other parts of life.”

Fender is hoping that an organized, branded guitar training regimen will appeal to new guitarists, hopefully more so than the troves of guitar-lesson content made available for free by a slew of online-focused guitarist on channels like YouTube. A free sample of lessons will be available with every guitar and amp sold when the program emerges. “Simply organising the content in a cogent way with a high quality production, we think, will warrant some percentage of the student universe gravitating toward a subscription model,” says Mooney.

Taking aim at guitarists who already know how to play, Fender launched what it calls its Mod Shop this past June. The shop acts as a customization engine that allows consumers to choose the components that make up their instrument and then order the completed product online. This year the company plans to expand the number of instruments that can be customized and include some amplifier products in the shop as well.

Mooney, who estimates his own guitar collection numbers around 50 instruments – many of them Fenders – stepped into the CEO role left vacant by Larry Thomas, a company board member who took on the roll following the 2010 retirement of Bill Mendello, a 30-year veteran of the Fender. Following Thomas’s exit in 2014, interim CEO Scott Gilbertson helmed the firm until a replacement could be found.

Looking back at his career, Mooney says Nike provides the closest comparison to his current company of any firm for which he’s worked in that the shoe and sportswear giant maintained an impressive roster of pro endorsers, as does Fender with renowned musicians. Nike, however, was able to parlay that sizzle into larger shares of its markets than Fender does.  “My belief,” says Mooney, “is we’ve got tremendous runway for growth and over time we can grow the percentage of artists that are adopting our product and translate that into market share.”