Searching for a Viable Strategy
In October, advertising firm Smith & Dorian announced that it had agreed to work with M. Hohner, Inc. on Hohner's first advertising campaign to target the American consumer in forty years (i.e., since Hitler had first come to power). The New York Times of October 20th reported that the company was again reaching out to children as the primary American market for its harmonicas, and specifically to scouting. The words quoted in the following excerpt are from Smith and Dorian executive Mort Wimpie:
The ads... put the accent on youth, and will appear in youth-directed publications, such as Jack and Jill, Junior Scholastic, and Boys' Life. The basic intention is to re-establish the instrument as part of the cultural pattern of the country.... This will be in terms of the interest of youth in folk, country and Western music - and even rock 'n' roll to some degree.
Note that the truly remarkable object of the campaign was to stem the tide of cultural change - to "re-establish" a disappearing cultural pattern - through the pages of Jack and Jill, Junior Scholastic, and Boys' Life. One wonders if the word "unrealistic" occurred to anyone at the time. Regardless, readers of Boys' Life soon saw this full page ad, which told people to write to Hohner's Hicksville address if they wanted to learn more:
Boys' Life, November 1964
Another advertisement of this series featured Brian Jones.
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Things were changing swiftly at Hohner. Less than two years later, a different advertising agency was launching another campaign, targeting not children and teens but their parents, who read Life magazine and the Sunday New York Times Magazine. It featured not only harmonicas, but Hohner's newly expanded product line. The venerable company, which over the course of one hundred and fifty years had amassed incomparable expertise with harmonicas and accordions, now was putting its logo on drums, keyboards (both electric and mouth-blown), and guitars (both acoustic and electric), about which as a corporation it knew comparatively little.
One imagines the difficulties which the changes inflicted on the entire business. Hicksville, like the rest of Hohner, now had to deal with marketing, shipments, inventory, sales, and repairs of completely different products. Teething pains were inevitable. It was reported that when Hohner introduced a new Beatles guitar model, which bore pictures and names of the Fab Four, two of the four names were accidentally switched, and thus appeared on the guitar matched with the wrong Beatle's pictures!
The diversification of the business meant that many people were inexperienced in their jobs - either the jobs themselves were new, or the people in them had been transferred from elsewhere in Hohner, or the people were new hires. Some of the traditional harmonica expertise got dispersed around the company, weakening expertise for the company's core product.
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