one of the biggest commercial mistakes that tackle companies made was the rod replacement deal.
Interesting looking at it from a retailers point of view isn't it.
From a market (not a marketing) point of view Unconditional Lifetime Warranties are simply bizarre - so a consumer can buy once and never again? Off hand I can't think of anyone now offering a Warranty that's not conditional in some form - where the owner pays for the replacement part or rod, or where the lifetime of the item of tackle is key and that's limited to a number of years. I'm also beginning to see warranties which are extremely expensive to implement and some where shops sell the consumer a replacement section - interesting idea and the shop makes a profit on the replacement sale.
Unconditional Warranties were initially used (ie marketed) by one company as a completely cynical and ruthless means of buying market share. They knew that it would de-value the market but.... Thing is it's very hard to put the genie back into the bottle, their competition had to match their deal, then almost everyone did it - now things are gradually easing back.
What that caused and to some extent has left us with is a high end market where the marketing effort focusses on and is driven by claims of better performance amongst other things - "I need to replace that venerable two year old rod because some genius rod designer has created the newest, latest greatest lightest stiffest fastest most ultimate-est...."
(In that sense its rather like the race to have more and more mega-pixies in a digital camera - bugger shutter accuracy or reliability, or lens quality, or camera build quality, or image quality - gimme more pixies.)
On the other hand, I know from a magazine survey that the number of fly-rods we now each own has risen dramatically. Where in the past it was typical for a keen angler to have one or two rods, now they might have a dozen or more - somewhere between 6 and 12 seemed typical for those wo replied to the survey.
