Brand New Start
Fender’s mission to reduce the number of beginner players who quit in their first year
Fender CEO Andy Mooney recently highlighted the 90 per cent abandonment rate of new guitarists within the first year – and the company’s plans to address it. According to Mooney, the company found that 45 per cent of the guitars Fender sold in a year went to new players, of which 90 per cent abandoned the instrument within their first year. “As an industry, we don’t have a problem attracting new entrants, we have a member-retention issue.”
In response, the company is being proactive in providing two different services to make learning easier for beginners – and increase the industry’s customer base as a result. Its Fender Play online tuition subscription service is aimed at teaching players fundamental techniques as well as songs. Meanwhile, the Fender Songs service that has launched in the US (with a European release to follow later in 2020) gives access to more than 750,000 songs to learn.
“We felt if we could reduce the abandonment rate by just 10 per cent we could double the size of the industry,” Mooney adds.“[There are] a million new entrants in English-speaking countries alone every year; only 100,000 of them commit.”
Fender is also keen to reach out to the female players who account for half of those first-time players, and that will go as far as a change in signature model releases this year. “We’ll introduce more signature guitars for female artists next year than we’ve done in our entire 70-year history, on a very broad range of genres and personalities,” confirms the CEO. “So we’re pretty excited about that.” www.fender.com