Today, the industry seems to be enamored of the idea of using “influencers” to sell their products. I’m not a fan, but neither am I against the idea of tribes or followers or whatever you want to call them. It’s just that tribes that don’t buy are really nothing more than shoppers. If your brand’s going to be successful, you need purchasers to become advocates of your brand. If you can’t monetize the zillion people who follow the celebrity influencer du jour, you need to reexamine your priorities.
Here’s my biggest concern: if someone is representing your brand and they’re not a recognized expert or authority (think Jerry Miculek and Smith & Wesson revolvers, Rob Leatham and Springfield Armory, Daniel Horner, Max Michel and Lena Miculek with SIG, or Doug Koenig with Ruger), you might want to rethink your strategy.
Even then, you need some pretty solid rules to guide those relationships. There are no guarantees something bad won’t happen.
You need to realize you’re essentially trusting your brand to someone who might one day go off the reservation. And anything they say or post in today’s instant outrage culture can have far-reaching implications for them and for your brand.
And God forbid they do something illegal. That can be catastrophic. If you think I’m exaggerating, Google “TV hunting hosts who have broken hunting laws.” I stopped reading at the tenth page, but I was reminded of all the violators whose names have essentially been erased by former sponsors.
The industry has plenty of formerly well-known TV celebrity hunters who are outcasts today. They were decidedly effective at using the products they endorsed, but “used by a convicted Lacey Act violator” has considerably less panache than “chosen by discriminating hunters.”
Not every regulation was knowingly broken, and neither did every guilty verdict mean the death penalty for the TV show or its host. But every brand associated with the show and the host was impacted.
Please remember there are two types of “reach” and “impact.” Only one is good for business.
On a completely different topic, it looks like everyone watching the Vista/CSG/MNC soap opera, er, sale needs to press the pause button. Again. Yesterday, the offer price from Czechoslovak Group (CSG) went up to $2.15 billion, a fifty million dollar jump in the purchase price.
All this follows Friday’s news that Vista Outdoors’ second largest shareholder, Gates Capital Management, announced they were opposing the proposed sale of Vista’s Kinetic Group to CSG. They appear to want more time to see if the MNC Capital offer isn’t better can be sweetened.
That hasn’t changed opinions at Vista. A statement from Vista’s Chairman of the Board Michael Callahan says, “We are confident the transaction with CSG maximizes value for our shareholders and provides stockholders the opportunity to realize significant value in Revelyst when separated from The Kinetic Group.”
Callahan sounds confident, but the shareholder meeting that was originally set for today has been postponed until July 30.
Fox Business reported Friday that despite the opposition by shareholders, spurned suitor MNC Capital insists their last and final proposal is on the table ($3.2 billion) for Vista. Company officials have said repeatedly that it believes the deal “significantly undervalues Vista Outdoor as a whole and especially the Revelyst business.” That offer, would also be subject to due diligence.
Meanwhile, CSG says it’s ready, willing, and approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) for the sale. The Prague, Czechoslovakia-based company had originally felt that CFIUS approval would be the major stumbling block in the acquisition.
It seems MNC is determined to change that opinion.
If shareholders approve the CSG deal next week, Callahan says the CSG/Vista transaction has the “ability to close in early August.” As you might expect, Vista shares were up in trading yesterday. Shareholders of record at the sale’s conclusion (in the CSG deal) would get the purchase price per share, a portion of an additional $125 million in cash from Vista and a share in Revelyst for each Vista share.
As always, we’ll keep you posted.
Granted that some regulations can be convoluted, but as hunters and/or anglers, we oughta know the regs at least as well as the game warden, because we are the ones who stand to lose.
If I see an interaction between a game warden, especially Federal fish and game, and a hunter, I’m going to assume the hunter is in the right. I watched a game warden drive up and honk to run the deer off of a active hunt because he thought it was out of season, only to discover when he got to the blind that it was a father and son on a youth hunting season day.
But the worst was when I was on a big corporate dove hunt and after a volley one of the guys walked out and grabbed one of the birds and put it in his pile and grabbed another one of the dove and put it into the pile of the guy next to him. A federal Fish and Game Warden walked out and told him that he had put the bird he shot in the other guy’s pile and bird that the other guy shot in his pile, fined him and revoked his license. Both white winged dove.
Conversely, there have been many times that I’ve watched active poaching take place and called the game warden only for nothing to ever come of it.
I’ve never had much interest in hunting shows anyway. I was taking game long before these so called experts were even born with far less technology and a success rate that was life depending. There is nothing I need to learn that I don’t already know about putting food on the table anyway. I still do it with some of the same guns I used decades ago without a fancy scope, range finder or the latest gadget hot off the shelf. Unfortunately the need for fame drives people like this to look the other way when it comes to hunting regs which only makes it harder for those of us who do follow the laws. It’s happened in almost every state over the last decade where these clowns flaunt the laws for likes and $$$ giving the rest of the hunting public and industry a bad name. An industry along with hunters that supports animal and land conservation with over $2,000,000,000 annually. So I have no sympathy for criminals like this. In fact they should be locked away from society no different than any other felon and as a disgrace to the hunting world.
The biggest chilling effect for me was never the pre-dawn hikes, the expense or the weather. It was always the bureaucracy and the fallible agents tasked with enforcing it.
I always wondered if these types of shows and those survival shows where they trap and kill had all their i’s dotted and t’s crossed and whose job it was to make sure. The hosts? The producers? The network lawyers? The contestants?