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Essay on Steinway & Sons - Marketing Case Study
What rationale do you think the Selmer Company had for buying Steinway on April 18, 1995? What marketing opportunities exist within this industry and/or within the company?
The grounds on which the Selmer Company decided to buy Steinway & Sons on April 18, 1995 was to increase profitability in both businesses by attempting to develop a synergy between Selmer and Steinway in the educational and professional market. As the industry leader in band and orchestral instruments, Selmer may have different customers than Steinway, and vice-versa. Selmer has 34% share in student markets and 45% in professional instrument markets.
The marketing opportunity for Steinway is their established name and their years of successful business in the music industry. They have established themselves as the piano pioneers over the years. And now that the merger between Selmer and Steinway has taken place it will also give a boost to its marketing strategies. The merger of Steinway & Sons with the Selmer Company and its woodwind and band instruments has introduced a number of new strategic possibilities. The future demand for the band instruments made by Selmer is predictable from demographic data, peaking as larger cohorts of children enter high school. So this gives the new company a predictable source of demand for its products. So far as growth is concerned, pianos are important and there is no doubt that growth in demand for pianos will occur mainly in Asia and so this is the current focus of company attention. There are also other instruments that have high quality standards and which have high sales and growth rates, e.g. guitars. These may be areas, which offer new opportunities for the enlarged firm. Finally, the Steinway brand name, itself, is unsurpassed in terms of its positive reputation. In the future, this too could be used in a number of different ways.......
