Aqualung's stance on e commerce

[Wolfie2012]

The market will take care of all of this. If traditional "dive shops" are not adding any value to consumers, then they will be supplanted by a source of air fills, and some way to connect instructors with students.

Likewise, in the future divers will probably get the gear that they want, based on a whole host of information sources like ScubaBoard, rather than just buying whatever the shop stocks based on their instructor's recommendations. This arrangement never served the customer best, and if it gets replaced by some new way of delivering (1) training, (2) gear, and (3) service, then so be it. The notion that the "sport" of diving is dependent on small dive shops overcharging for gear seems pretty far fetched.

Very true... Free Market Economics! Adam Smith, Milton Friedman.... Good stuff. No matter how much these manufacturers want to control the industry, the consumers will ultimately decide what will happen.. and I don't see the Internet going away anytime soon.

 

[Crawl79]

I hope no one gets offended by this but I consider myself the future of scuba diving. I am young[under 30], I have a good job which allows me to spend money on diving, and I can't imagine life without the internet.
I have nothing against the LDS but I personally have not spent one dollar at the local dive shop near my home and that includes training. I don't consider myself experienced but somehow I have made close to 100 dives in less than 2 years. Maybe my case is different because I travel allot and get my traing while traveling and my equipment from the internet but I don't think I could see myself buying equipment from a company that seems so much against my ideas of global commerce.
And before anyone flames me for not supporting my LDS I would like everyone to know that I have spent money at local dive shops just not the one closest to me, most of which were focused on training and not sales but were happy to recommend gear to me knoking that I was not a potential longterm customer for them.
I have much more to add to this but since I am typing this from my blackberry I will save more for later.

 

[The Chairman]

You ARE the future of diving. Great post!

 

[Cacia]

yea, ditto.

typed from my blackberry...gotta love it

 

[tracy_from_oz]

I hope no one gets offended by this but I consider myself the future of scuba diving. I am young[under 30], I have a good job which allows me to spend money on diving, and I can't imagine life without the internet.
I have nothing against the LDS but I personally have not spent one dollar at the local dive shop near my home and that includes training. I don't consider myself experienced but somehow I have made close to 100 dives in less than 2 years. Maybe my case is different because I travel allot and get my traing while traveling and my equipment from the internet but I don't think I could see myself buying equipment from a company that seems so much against my ideas of global commerce.
And before anyone flames me for not supporting my LDS I would like everyone to know that I have spent money at local dive shops just not the one closest to me, most of which were focused on training and not sales but were happy to recommend gear to me knoking that I was not a potential longterm customer for them.
I have much more to add to this but since I am typing this from my blackberry I will save more for later.

You are the future of the sport, I can agree with you as you and I sound like we are in the same situation.
I am under 30, been diving since age 15 and have a good job to let myself buy some nice gear, travel to nice dive locations etc.

I travel alot for work, however I take all my gear with me whenever I travel. If it is a city I have been to before there is a great chance I have dived there and dived with the lds. It may have been hooking up for shore dives/boat dives and also to rent gear eg tanks and weights.
Any new place I have to travel to I do an Internet search on google.com and also here on the board. I go through web sites etc/contact the lds I like directly through email and go diving with them.

I am looking forward to doing some speciality training this year but in all honest because of my work commitments I will probably do the courses in Los Angeles and New York city.
I look at it that I am supporting my local lds it is just the local lds of the city I am in at the time.

I am about to replace all my gear with top of the line Mares equipment which will cost a bit. The question is how do I support my local lds here in Australia if the gear I want is not available in my country or is a ridiculous price and a special order?

If companies are not willing to expand and be flexible in the work place as well as work on the supply and demand models, giving the customer satisfaction but trying to dictate a market place no one wants then I do not see that company being successful for very long or eventually going out of business because of it being archaic in design.

 

[CDNScubaMoose]

I have begun a career in sales and although it is not related to diving at all it is similar in that I have a large number of customers and the products which I sell are on the expensive side. So my take on this discussion is that it has been my experience that there are two major types of customers: those that are price sensitive and those that are service sensitive. These are the two extremes and most people fall in between the two but very few are right in the middle of the descriptions, so each customer leans on way or the other and it is that leaning that I use to classify which type of customer they are.

I think the same could be said about divers - there are those that want and appreciate the highest level of customer service and are willing to pay for it while there are also those that don't value the service the same way (for whatever reason) and are driven by price (the laws of economics at work). I don't think either group is wrong in their approach - they just want what they feel is best for them. And has been mentioned before, many successful retailers attempt to satisfy both groups. But there are retailers that are successful in only catering to one group (they may be in the minority but they do exist). If AL wants to support retailers that focus on the service side over the price side then that should be their decision. I do have a major issue with the fact that from what I have learned from this thread they seem to be saying one thing and doing something completely different.

If AL wants to support only one type of retailer then that is their decision and if they are committed to that idea then I'll assume that they have done a considerable amount of industry analysis and there must be a reason behind this decision. I don't completely agree with the arguement that free market forces will make for a better industry. Some examples against the free market could be the effect that the free market has had on air pollution or overfishing (to but a diving spin on it). What the negative impacts of the internet could be on the economy - not going to speculate but I think it is unrealistic to assume that the internet is only going to bring good things for the diving industry.

 

[mike_s]

Back to my question of how did Aqualung get its start....

Didn't they start off as US Divers? And didn't US Divers start by doing mail order dive gear during the 1950's since there were hardly no dive stores then?


If that is true, how is this different? The internet is just another form of mail order but has an online catalog instead of a print catalog.

 

[MikeFerrara]

I have begun a career in sales and although it is not related to diving at all it is similar in that I have a large number of customers and the products which I sell are on the expensive side. So my take on this discussion is that it has been my experience that there are two major types of customers: those that are price sensitive and those that are service sensitive. These are the two extremes and most people fall in between the two but very few are right in the middle of the descriptions, so each customer leans on way or the other and it is that leaning that I use to classify which type of customer they are.

I think the same could be said about divers - there are those that want and appreciate the highest level of customer service and are willing to pay for it while there are also those that don't value the service the same way (for whatever reason) and are driven by price (the laws of economics at work). I don't think either group is wrong in their approach - they just want what they feel is best for them. And has been mentioned before, many successful retailers attempt to satisfy both groups. But there are retailers that are successful in only catering to one group (they may be in the minority but they do exist). If AL wants to support retailers that focus on the service side over the price side then that should be their decision. I do have a major issue with the fact that from what I have learned from this thread they seem to be saying one thing and doing something completely different.

If AL wants to support only one type of retailer then that is their decision and if they are committed to that idea then I'll assume that they have done a considerable amount of industry analysis and there must be a reason behind this decision. I don't completely agree with the arguement that free market forces will make for a better industry. Some examples against the free market could be the effect that the free market has had on air pollution or overfishing (to but a diving spin on it). What the negative impacts of the internet could be on the economy - not going to speculate but I think it is unrealistic to assume that the internet is only going to bring good things for the diving industry.

I think a point you may be missing is that many of the online retailers are providing great service. In some cases FAR superior to what you my find at your local dive shop and at a much more competative price. These days we can get both price and service.

 

[Wayward Son]

The whole "professional dive shop" model, as best I can tell, was actually started by Bonin as he got Scubapro off the ground. he came from a background deal with golf pro shops & saw, in his opinion, that it was needed in diving. An interview with him is online here:

Edit- looking through that interview, it was not golf shops that was his background, so I may be mixing him up with someone else. But he was a driving force in this model.

http://www.fathomspub.com/cgi/interview.pl/9/index.html

When I started diving (1972-1975 on a USAF base in Turkey), none of us had any Scubapro gear & other than in magazines I never saw any. At the time I didn't know why, but this was the reason. Other brands we could buy through the mail, including US Divers which happened to be my brand of choice then. At any rate, brands we had included US Divers (Aqualung), Dacor, AMF Voit (I regarded this as crap), Healthways & some others, but absolutely no Scubapro.

It wasn't until a few years later, back in the states when my LDS happened to be an SP dealer that I saw & started using SP gear.

The now defunct training agency NASDS also adopted this model & strictly followed it. It's my impression that it was not uncommon for SP shops to also be NASDS shops at the time. This was true of the one in TN where I finally got formally certified, he was an SP shop teaching PADI who changed to NASDS about the time I 1st met him, so my card was from NASDS.

This is a model that worked well for a lot of shops for a long time. The world is changing though & IMHO a business model that does not recognize these changes and deliberately handle them is a business model that will one day wake up & find itself sliding to extinction.

How it should handle it is debatable, but this statement from AL isn't handling it, it's denying that anyone needs to.

 

[Scared Silly]

The funny part about Aqualung's position is that when it comes to Suunto products, it is only the dive products that are restricted. I think if pressure is put on Suunto that they may decide to use a different route for distribution. As it seems dumb that 1/3 of their product line is "closed" while the other 2/3 is open.