Once again we have a camera manufacturer (Panasonic with the L10) announcing that orders for a new camera “greatly exceeds our expectations.” The actual truth: orders exceeded what they can deliver initially. Why not just say that?
By using the “exceeds our expectations” wording, the Japanese are constantly saying, in essence, that they are producing cameras that that they thought wouldn’t have all that much interest initially. That they could deliver to expectations, and expectations were low.
Further, this wastes early buzz for a new product, as people get in line, find they can’t get it, and then buy something else for their upcoming trip, vacation, event, whatever.
There was a time in the digital era when companies announced their initial production level for a new product, and if demand exceeded that, they’d apologize that they couldn’t deliver to demand and would increase the manufacturing level. Unfortunately, as total unit volumes plummetted after 2011 and supply chain issues started becoming a regular problem, no one seems to want to say how many they can produce or whether they can increase production to meet demand.
Instead, they’ve all taken the “this product went viral on us” approach when demand exceeds supply, but that may actually be counterproductive. The thing about “going viral” is that it is a very temporary thing. Yesterday’s viral is today’s out of sight. If you ask your local camera dealer, they’ll tell that when a wait list for a new product lasts longer than a month, quite a few people on that list decline to buy when the product finally becomes available.
I’m a believer that accurate information, updated as necessary, is the best approach to just about everything, including marketing. If it were my company, I would have said “We hoped that [this] would be a popular product, and initial demand confirms that. However, our initial production won’t meet that current demand. Accordingly, we’ll do our best to rapidly increase production and get cameras to everyone that wants one as quickly as possible.” (I’d be tempted to put real numbers in there, but customers don’t always understand numbers. 50k units a year would be a good sales number for something like an L10, for instance. And maybe the monthly production capacity is 5K units. That doesn’t sound like much to most people, but it’s actually a healthy number and a lot of today’s cameras are produced at or just above that level. After all, only 8m cameras of all kinds from all Japanese makers were sold last year, and almost half of those came from one company that makes a couple of dozen models.
The real issue is what happens two or three months after a camera introduction and demand is being met. How do you keep demand up? That’s called marketing. And the Japanese companies are still pretty poor at that. It doesn’t help that they’re putting all their shouting voice into what happens during launch weeks.