A general Carrera discussion

6967 Views 73 Replies 23 Participants Last post by thomas, Jun 29, 2004

moped rider

Discussion Starter · Apr 27, 2004 (Edited by Moderator)

Really this is a response to Tropi who has made a comment aimed at the UK market but I do applaude the efforts of Thomas to bring us Carrera news and European Carrera fans no doubt all give Thomas the big thumbs up.

Ultimately its all about how pro-active companies are and the amount of investment they make in the marketing of slot cars to the masses.

No amount of service matters if a company does not promote its products. The products will just gather dust.

Its one thing e-stockists stocking product, but is the product selling?

The issue for slot car companies worldwide is the nature of return that they get from any marketing investment.

Like tobacco companies are they attempting to switch existing users of other brands in what is perceived as a flat market, or expand the market as a whole and create growth?

Most slot car companies know where there marketing bread is buttered. Some retailers in the UK are good at promoting product locally by getting out and seeing the people but they possibly get support for this. No doubt the same situation occurs in Germany and Spain. This is over and above direct promotion of the hobby by the slot car manufactures themselves which can be very expensive and therefore has financial risk.

Considering for example that Carrera have exclusive rights to the Ferrari F1 cars, have any of you seen any promotional spend by Carrera at all in the UK to promote this fact?

They are simply reliant on the goodwill of enthusiasts in the UK to purchase the cars.

Argos carried an advert before Xmas on TV promoting Scalextric which was as a result of some effort by Hornby. Would Carrera have been willing to have made the same investment in the UK market?

And how has the "Argos" sale gone down with many of the e-tailors that we support here? Some of us know the answer!

I have said this before and I will say it again. To the great mass of the population Scalextric marketing in Germany broadly promotes Carrera. SCX marketing in the UK broadly promotes Hornby Scalextric. Hornby marketing as Superslot in Spain broadly promotes Spanish Scalextric. This is the conundrum for slot car manufacturers. America is the one market where it is a true free for all IMHO but there are Americans at SCI who would say otherwise.

UKsqueezea and a few others know where I am coming from here.

Moped

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astro

· #19 · Apr 28, 2004

to peter and moped.

Must say, I did find mopeds earlier posts both interesting and intelligible. Agreed with sum bits and not others. Was amazed at how others had read his posts and jumped down his neck!

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astro

· #24 · Apr 29, 2004 (Edited by Moderator)

J-C - people have been accused of knocking carrera here, but if you re-read the posts, you will find that no-one has criticised the products at all. Some people HAVE said that it is not surprising that carrera are not a widely known or sold product since Carrrera make no effort to market or promote the stuff in the UK, and their distributors do not manage to make the products widely available in shops.

If anything, such comments could be viewed as attempts to let carrera notice some peoples opinions of what has to be done if they wished to break into the UK market in a bigger way.

I think everyone thinks that the more manufacturers there are, and the better they are distributed and marketed, the better it is for everyone (enthusiasts, manufacturers and distributors)

PS - if moped edited something, it was probably to make what he was really saying clearer, not to 'tone down' a secret subversive message!

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astro

· #43 · Apr 29, 2004

My understanding of this thread -

'the wider recognition of carrera (in the UK)' - this to me relates to the facvt you can go into a specialist slot car shop, and find lots of ninco track, scx, scalextric, but almost always no carrera.

The cars are fairly widespread, but less so than scx or even fly. Perhaps the quality 'deserves' a higher profile?

This is the issue which some people have been replying to.

And Mopeds (I think valid, if not unquestionable) thought was: No, just having a good product is not enough to take up that kind of shop floor and stock space/money. The company should do some marketing and advertising in the UK if they are to expect the product to be seen for what it is, and have a place amongst the front runners.

My opinion of the argos sets is that they will not develope a foothold in the uk for carrera, because the kids who get the sets will not be able to easily get extra track and track accesories. If they want to expand, it will be easier to start again with scalex.scx or ninco (unless they finf SF and all the greeat links and help available here!)

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astro

· #45 · Apr 29, 2004 (Edited by Moderator)

a quick look at the scalex old news section shows that recently scaly auctioned too rare cars for cancer research. I am sure they done other stuff, but this is the spirit of what has been said. But why is this issue so important? or is it more important to question moped? Everyone on here makes some pretty wild statements and assertions from time to time, but every utterance of moped's seems to be put under the microscope.

This consistent behaviour is not name calling, though some of the deleted name calling has been none of the sort (poeple using the turn of phrase 'only an idiot would call this a such and such' to which some literal logic has been applied and interpretted as the poster calling someone else an idiot).

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astro

· #48 · Apr 29, 2004 (Edited by Moderator)

QUOTE - that Carrera was somehow riding on the coattails of Scaley marketing, and therefore already enjoy a disproportionate and undeserved visibility in the UK market compared to their lack of advertising

I interpretted the 'sacred text of moped' on that in a different manner, I am not sure which of us is correct. I thought he more meant that if carrera did a roadshow in the UK, it would benefit Scalextric more than it would Carrera (which I can see would have some justification - in that some people seeing the roadshow would see a 'slot' roadshow, not a 'carrera' roadshow, and end up buying the market leader ie scalextric from toys-r-us)

Seems to me that everyone on this thread completely agrees with everyone else, but is just arguing for the sake of it

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astro

· #53 · Apr 30, 2004

Mas, the market penetration idea is a very sound one. It is almost certainly NOT the reason for the discount. The set is advertised brand-un-named in a small section of the 'sale' adendum of the argos catalogue; Argos show no signs of continuing to stock any Carrera at all. All the evidence points to a massive overstocking, surprise at non-moving-stock clearance sale.

Most of the 'kids' (as opposed to informed slot-forum folk) will not know that carrera is a massive german player in the slot-world, this info is not obvious. They will have to judge for themselves the quality of the product. I expect the average kid mag racer will be jealous of the (in my experience and personal opinion) faster scalextric sport set that his mate down the road has - not realising the benefits for non-mag slideing, 1:24th scale etc.

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astro

· #72 · Jun 29, 2004

hi uksqueezea,

with respect, what on earth are you talking about? It sounds as if its interesting, but whats it got to do with Carrera? Why were you breaking the cars - crashing them or something else? Why did he laugh? What did that have to do with the manufacturing move to china?????

cheers

Dave

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