Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

Jeff Babcock

Jeff Babcock

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Jan 11, 2011
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It seems as though a bit of Midas and Klark is positively influencing some change at Music Group, and they are trying to invest in cleaning up their image of the Behringer brand. Time will tell, but it certainly is interesting.

From another forum, the VP of the "new" customer care division of Behringer had the following to say:

I fully agree that our customer support was poor in the past as we completely relied on external service centers and even third party spare part providers. This clearly didn’t work and I apologize on behalf of the Company.

We are surely not perfect but our CEO, Uli Behringer, has made it a top priority to improve our customer experience in every aspect of our business. As such we have invested serious resources in multiple areas such as manufacturing, quality assurance and customer support. We respect that people are skeptical, however we now have our own service centers in Nevada for the US market plus Kidderminster, UK which services the EU. Overall, our Care Division employs over 125 employees on four continents providing support in 7 languages.

We certainly can’t undo the past but we will try our utmost to offer a higher level of service. Together with our new 3 year warranty policy and our new Care centers, we are confident that our customers will see improvement in all aspects of customer experience. Please feel free to reach out to me anytime for help and please give us your feedback. This is important for us to continue to improve.
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Re: Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

I suspect this is more a maturation, or a later stage in the life of the corporation as growth opportunities from expanding into new ancillary markets slows down, and the importance of selling new products to repeat customers increases. You can get the first customer sale based on low price alone, but repeat business to that same customer is based on after sale satisfaction.

I applaud their active participation in forums using official identified representatives. This alone should damp down the mindless piling on. That said the best PR will fail if there is no substance to support the new improved image.

it was only a matter of time for him to grow in scale to become a target of other bottom feeders. The only viable defense against that is a selling proposition based on something other than price alone.

JR
 
Re: Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

Great business insight as usual JR. I was quite surprised to see that Uli himself is doing a Q&A here.

FWIW, it would be a great addition to this site to have some occasional Q&A sessions with well known industry players, much like what happens on some of the recording sites....
 
Re: Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

I really like the format of that Q&A. I'm looking forward to reading that, especially considering the questions I've read so far. I'd like to see a feature every three months called "Ten questions with..." featurng questions generated and selected by forum members.
 
Re: Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

Look, these guys are in it for the money. They have tried forever to sell gear to the pro market without any success, so they waited until Midas was up for grabs and bought that so that they could get more credibilty in the community as well as insight into better products.

It's just a marketing ploy to sell us gear. Nobody became nicer or anything else, they just have decided it's time to get us to buy their new stuff since we wouldn't buy their old stuff.
 
Re: Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

I have had to bite my tongue and not answer several of Uli's questions.

Of course he is doing it for the money... :-) and wants to sell everything to everybody. Who wouldn't?

One could argue that accumulating multiple brands is another thing copied from Mackie (Loud?) :-) . This gets back to the old "one brand can not occupy both a high performance and good for the money perception in the marketplace". Using different brands to more completely address the total market is not a new concept (think Ford, Mercury, Lincoln....... Jaguar, Volvo...... oops too many brands). This too can deliver diminishing returns when overdone, or if a market has way too much manufacturing capacity (like the car market) chasing too few buyers.

JR

PS: There is a History of Behringer (in their words) on their website, that answers some questions asked, or at least suggests the typical answers we will get to those kinds of question. I doubt they will contradict their official story this is typical corporate marketing.

PPS: people need to check their anger and ask questions that might actually get answered to expand our understanding.
 
Re: Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

John Roberts said:
PPS: people need to check their anger and ask questions that might actually get answered to expand our understanding.
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Maybe. If Behringer wants to earn any real credibility at the more pro level (and I'm not sure they necessarily do), they'll need to address the dominant image problems they have earned with their business practices - IP theft, poor product quality, etc.

Other than that, I'm not all that interested in what Uli's favorite breakfast cereal is.

FWIW I have no first hand anger at Behringer, as I've never ever owned a Behringer product. Unless the corporate makeover is a lot deeper than a new marketing campaign, that trend will continue.
 
Re: Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

TJ Cornish said:
Maybe. If Behringer wants to earn any real credibility at the more pro level (and I'm not sure they necessarily do), they'll need to address the dominant image problems they have earned with their business practices - IP theft, poor product quality, etc.
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You present those as a given... How do you address those perceptions better than confrontation in an open forum?

While we probably apply a different standard than the courts to fair IP usage, they have dealt with legal challenges using legal tools.

Poor product quality is IMO often a confusion between features and quality. Many things that pro users consider "quality" are actually design decisions driven by customer preference. I consider many of these low quality perceptions as missing features more than poor quality, which to my understanding is whether it is built exactly to the design or not.

If their build quality was as bad as perception in some circles they would not be profitable enough to buy other companies.

I do not suggest that these perceptions are unfounded, just that it isn't as black and white as some may think...
Other than that, I'm not all that interested in what Uli's favorite breakfast cereal is.
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agreed... I already know more than I wish... from promotion, PR, and experience, but I have been in the trenches and paying attention for decades.
FWIW I have no first hand anger at Behringer, as I've never ever owned a Behringer product. Unless the corporate makeover is a lot deeper than a new marketing campaign, that trend will continue.
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I don't think Pro customers should ever expect a large consumer company to act small again... A formerly free standing small company, now acting as a division within a larger company has pros and cons. One Pro is that the larger company generally has the higher technology (contrary to most opinion) that can be utilized in new designs, on the downside the larger, more mainstream parent will now be in charge and the small company will be expected to change to be more like the parent and not the other way around, based on who bought whom..

Only one of the two won the economic struggle that really matters to survival. Of course I could be wrong...

JR
 
Re: Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

TJ said:
Maybe. If Behringer wants to earn any real credibility at the more pro level (and I'm not sure they necessarily do), they'll need to address the dominant image problems they have earned with their business practices - IP theft, poor product quality, etc.
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John Roberts said:
You present those as a given... How do you address those perceptions better than confrontation in an open forum?
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I present those as dominant image problems, not necessarily as given; but as you often say - "The customer is always right, even when they're wrong", so I'm not sure it makes any difference. I agree that the best way to address these is confronting those in an open forum. Only being willing to entertain softball questions makes no progress in this direction. I do agree that there are ways to moderate the emotion and that it is desirable to do so, however not acknowledging that they are there just rubs salt.


John Roberts said:
I don't think Pro customers should ever expect a large consumer company to act small again... A formerly free standing small company, now acting as a division within a larger company has pros and cons. One Pro is that the larger company generally has the higher technology (contrary to most opinion) that can be utilized in new designs, on the downside the larger, more mainstream parent will now be in charge and the small company will be expected to change to be more like the parent and not the other way around, based on who bought whom..

Only one of the two won the economic struggle that really matters to survival. Of course I could be wrong...

JR
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Yamaha and JBL/Harmon are interesting examples of fairly healthy companies that still somehow manage to make good pro level stuff without going bankrupt every 5 years. I don't know the relative size of them compared to Music Group, but it does seem to suggest that it can be done.
 
Re: Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

Sorry I didn't mean to start a dialog here...

I may be a little to close to the business to be completely objective about subjective impressions, but IMO of Yamaha, JBL and Harmon only Yamaha comes close to occupying high end and value ends of the spectrum. Harmon Automotive has been the consumer tail wagging that dog for years but it started out has a home hifi brand. JBL has been selling down and coasting on their good reputation for a long long time... But James B Lansing has been dead a while.

The consolidation of brands is a natural progression as markets mature, and I'm kind of waiting for some big dog Chinese OEM to buy some US audio brands. It kind of makes sense for them to try to capture more of the profit. Uli is an odd hybrid since he started out as a western brand then morphed into a chinese manufacturer.

At the end of the day I don't care where stuff is made... As the yuan appreciates, and dollar gets cheaper who knows, we may start making more stuff back here again. What matters to me is the design, the BOM, and process control... Service after the sale matters too, but this often gets traded away in pursuit of lowest possible price.

JR

PS: Speaking of brand's, who knows the new name for what was the "Kodak theater" in Hollyweird?
 
Re: Seems like Uli is attempting to clean up his image...

Jack Arnott said:
Dolby, and it was funny to hear Kai Ryssdal say that at least we know the Oscars will have good sound.
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Ding ding ding... Correct. Now Dolby is a pretty remarkable company for how they turned a noise reduction technology used on an obsolete media into a nice revenue stream, and their name in lights.

JR
 
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