You Get What You Pay For: The Value The Pro Audio Dealer Delivers

The internet is a great tool for finding the absolute lowest price for products.  And as a result we’re becoming engrained with the notion that we always have to get the lowest absolute cost for products.  Would you ever pay the lowest price for heart surgery?  I know that’s a silly analogy, but in many cases getting the lowest price isn’t necessarily the best deal for us in the long term.

Listen is a product manufacturer. We sell products only to value added professional audio dealers.  Without those dealers, it would be almost impossible for Listen to do business. Our job as a manufacturer is to deliver high quality products to our dealers; help our dealers in the specification, installation and support of product installations; and to provide long term support for our dealer and their customers.

As such, the dealer adds value to the end user by determining the specific needs of the customer, specifying a collection of products that meets each customer’s individual needs, installation of those products and the long term support of those products. Thus, the value proposition between the end user, the dealer and the manufacturer is critical to meeting customer’s needs now in the long term.  Thus, when an end user makes a purchase of product, the dealer must build into that pricing the cost of design, installation and support.

Unfortunately, what seems to be happening these days is that dealer product profit margins are eroding.   This is probably a result of the “great recession” and customers using their bargaining power to competitively drive down prices.  But the underlying problem is that if dealer profitability declines, the dealer will be forced into either reducing services or charging for services that were once free or both.  In the end, the customer will end up “paying” anyway.