A varrógép értékesítése a világpiacon.A Singer nemzetközi marketing stratégiái, 1850–1914
Selling the sewing machine around the world: Singer’s international marketing strategies, 1850–1914

Summary/Abstract: The diffusion of the sewing machine across the world was remarkably high for the period before 1914. The fact that Singer was able to capture almost all of this demand has been explained here not as the result of deliberate marketing strategies attempting to build barriers to competitive entry in emerging markets. In fact, Singer’s marketing strategies were crude and undeveloped, even by the standards prevailing in international business by 1914. Rather Singer’s extraordinary success in foreign markets was more due to the peculiarities of the demand conditions surrounding consumer purchase of a complex consumer durable like a sewing machine. In particular, the combination of installment purchase contract and the regular presence of canvassers and collectors meant that sewing machine consumers, women in their homes, were able to overcome the inherent uncertainties associated with such a purchase. By investing in a retail organization, Singer minimized the costs to women sampling this complex product before purchasing. It was this investment in these market support services that constituted the building of their global brand. The company’s reward was to be the principal recipients of a mass consumer demand around the world. Singer’s growth and emergence as one of the largest companies of the early twentieth century was squarely built on scale economies in marketing, especially in the distribution of a branded complex consumer durable with its attendant market support services. The company captured enormous market share not because of any anticompetitive strategy but through recognizing early the importance of marketing and for its evangelistic zeal for reaching out to its potential customers and making their purchasing decision easy.

• Details
• Contents