Article On "The Myth of Brand and Maker in Pipesmoking" Good Read

[12pups]

Cosmic --
Here, sales and marketing don't even like talking to each other. Sales departments of our clients complain constantly that marketing doesn't help them sell. The marketing department tries to remind them that they are thinking too short term.
Constantly run into that. Weird, right? Isn't marketing supposed to help sales? Sales doesn't see marketing doing much for them.
We maybe should narrow this discussion down quite a bit. I don't see pipes advertised on tv or hear radio spots. So venue makes a difference. They exist here. How does Savinelli promote brand? How does Dunhill? Grabow?
My impression of Grabow is they just stay quiet. The are a huge market presence, and they probably just enjoy not screwing around with that.
But for ads here, how are pipe brands promoted? Where are we getting our perceptions of them -- except from each other?

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Grabow had the marketing strategy of having been found in drug stores for decades.

Dunhill was mostly mail order and tobacconist sold years ago. The other part of its strategy has been its pricing. It was also marketed mostly to bankers and doctors.
Savinelli, I'm not 100% sure about. They teeter between being a working man's pipe with their pricing, but quality with their styling.

 

[12pups]

Cosmic... about the "up your pricing" -- yes.
But it works best if you back that up with quality.
If you *sell yourself short*, the customer can't believe in you. You *have* to charge what you're worth.
But no, you can't keep charging more than you're worth. That's a short-sighted sales goal. You want your next contract, you want new customers, have recommendations and build up a reputation. Then you have to live up to live up to your brand promise.
I guess my turn in the discussion is pretty much over. Nothing we're saying is new, I don't think. Just "remembering" the points of discussion, more than anything.

 

[pipedreamer]

The Gov. has taken care of pipe advertising. I think you guys are mixing up factories with pipe carvers?.There are a small number of pipe makers in the world left trying to make great pipes. They don't receive much support.Funny, the last 3 large machines I have purchased have come from taiwan, China. We don't build them anymore. I hear, that cheap crap. If the specs are high the machine is right on.All the pipe carvers I know try to make the best possible pipe.The factories are always going to beat us on price. Across the board if the pipe isn't good, you put it in a basket. Pipe carvers throw them away.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Advertising is only 10% of what marketing is. Sure, we can't advertise in the US, but placement in a pipe store is 99% more effective. If the pipe is in a glass case, that is marketing. If it is in a bucket by the register, that is marketing. If it comes with a sock, box, bag, or feather tutu, that is marketing. If it goes well with a suit, or comes in wild colors... etc...
However, Grabow named themselves after a doctor as part of its scheme to make people believe that it was a "healthy" pipe. ha ha.
BTW, in one of the interviews on the radio show (I can't remember the episode) but it was with one of the best suppliers of aged briar out in Italy. The guys mentions that Dr Grabow buys the most volume of their best quality briar. Also, Grabow established a system of machine made pipes that started producing the highest volume of pipes in the world. Now, Grabow may not be the luxury liner pipe of pipes, but it is definitely one of the Henry Fords. They make their money off of volume. They use quality briar and have outstanding consistency. However, most pass them by because of the price=quality equation that we have in our heads. And, then when someone tries a Grabow, they come back on here and freak out about what great pipes they are, LOL. When there are thousands of pipe men coming home from working every day with a Grabow full of Carter Hall, no forums, no pipe clubs, just a smoker.

 

[pipedreamer]

Good luck to that. After going through 40 Grabows, all I can say is they are inexpensive. The briar cutter you referenced, said they are a large buyer of his briar. Grabows are not made from plateau Briar, and they do have a lot of fills. They do fill a need.Once in a while someone gets a smoker and then tells everybody they are wasting their money on more expensive pipes. Snobery comes in many forms. I would want you to sit down some time and pretend you are a pipe maker. Figure in all the costs, over head and two days pay at the rate you are at now.Don't forget tools , education and rent.Also figure out if you want to make a really great smoking pipe that last, or two holes that meet in any briar.( A good block goes for 60$, crap, 6$) stem material . tell me what a decent pipe should sell for?

 

[numbersix]

Snobery comes in many forms.

+1

 

[sablebrush52]

I'm not real smart, either. But why the heck would pipes be different than any other product on the market. Brand counts for something. It isn't just a myth. And you can't prove it's a myth just by asking old geezers like yourself. PhD? He's has PhD in pipes? (I'm thinking he probably shouldn't advertise his education unless it's pertinent to the topic).
Bottom line: You don't *get* to be a leading brand if you don't deserve it. You can't lead the pack unless there are reasons to follow you (except in diamonds, I guess). And often the knockoffs among those who are following you, learned what customers wanted *from* you. They're copying you. Or trying to. "Buyer beware" if they can't consistently pull it off.

Broad brush like that?

Sure, why not. You did, along with belittling and labeling anyone who might disagree with you.
Accepting a brand at face value is an invitation to be ripped off. Claims should always be examined critically.
McDonalds provides the best food? Really? Pancakes with the consistency of vulcanized rubber, better suited for a roofing material. Because THAT'S the basis of your argument.
Six, American care makers built some the best cars in the world for decades. Then the business changed it focus and started putting emphasis into whether the sound of a door closing made for a satisfying ca-thunk. Imports ate American makers' lunch. Finally American cars are kicking ass again.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

The Mercedes is an excellent example. They were a car used as a taxi in Europe, and the price went up with the added cost of getting them to the US. The market here associated the higher price with better quality, and they immediately went into the luxury car category here. They did step up their add-ons and even made some innovations later, but for the most part, price dictated the way the US market reacted to them.
Who was it that had said that they thought that a Cuban cigar was the nastiest thing ever that someone had given them, until they saw the price tag? LOL. We tend to set our standards of quality by the impact on our wallets.
@pipedreamer, I don't think anyone has challenged the artisan market.
Eh, I think we are all on the same page, we just have different theories about why things are as they are. Pretty soon we will be discussing the most overrated sandwiches and soups, LOL.
If you don't like it, don't buy it; smoke what you want; and you can't smoke straight grain or plateau, ha ha!!

 

[foggymountain]

In regard to your comments about Dunhills:

I happen to love the taste of many of them but not all. The difference is in what stain has been applied and how much of it. It takes many many years of heavy use to get rid of a strong stain taste. I had one pipe, a Ben Wade, that took over 30 years of regular use to get rid of the slightly unpleasant stain taste. With Dunhills certain stains are bad tasting. The black shells and Cumberlands are the worst. The reason is that the black stain was picked for the color, not the taste. The Cumberland uses too much stain. It is the same stain as is used on the Chestnut series, but there is way too much. The Bruyere is a good tasting stain once it is broken in just a little. The Chestnut is OK but needs more breakin than a Bruyere. The Amber Root also requires quite a bit of breakin but is a good tasting pipe afterwards. The Root Briar has a slight taste of vanilla when new. This goes away after a short while and the pipe becomes neutral tasting. The County is neutral tasting at the start. I have not tried Tan Shell, Red or Ruby Bark Dunhills. What is remarkable is that the taste of the Dunhills is very consistent for a given finish. I have had roughly 115 new Dunhills, and only one or two were a disappointment.

I do not know about whether they are really oil cured, or whether the briar is cured 60 years as claimed (hard to believe), but these things don't really matter. The taste does.

 

[foggymountain]

Six: Thanks for the great picture of John L. He used to hang out in a restaurant I managed 75 years later, Cavanaugh's.

 

[numbersix]

Six: Thanks for the great picture of John L. He used to hang out in a restaurant I managed 75 years later, Cavanaugh's.

No fooling? That's pretty cool foggy.

 

[mso489]

Great review and critique on Dunhill stains and the tastes they impart, foggy. That's one thing I like about Savenelli's

unfinished pipes is that they are nearly untreated as you get. They may have something on them, but very little, and

no detectable taste once you have some carbon in the bowl. They feel like they are breathing through the briar. I

don't think that's likely, but I enjoy the sensation.

 

[thehappypiper]

As has been stated above, snobbery is bad, whether reverse or not. Quality is quality, but what some of the membership are correctly railing against [but losing their finnesse in the process] is that quality and price have a wierd, wavy relationship. Take leather for instance. Saddleback make some of the highest-quality leather goods out there and they sell them at extremely reasonable prices. Louis Vuitton are of course, the Dunhill of leather goods; while their products aren't bad and some of them are pretty good, the prices they exact from the Designer Faithfuls is morally reprehensible.

Similarly with clothes; it is a nonsense to pretend that some clothes are not much, much better-made than others, but this does not necessitate a trip to your local Gucci boutique. It necessitates a thorough grounding in what makes a fabric better, what a good cut looks like, how a jacket [for instance] is supposed to fit. The finest denim in the world is now Japanese. Get the right tailor and you can save yourself thousands on a suit; get the right fit from a well-made, reasonably-priced jacket [for say $300] and you wil look and feel far better than if you had relied on the compliments of the commission-based salesman in the Armani shop.

You can say the same thing about almost all products we can buy. Good coffee costs a lot- my dad hates good coffee! He has spent forty years puting too much milk and sugar in his coffee to even remember what the bean tastes like. Smgness at having conned a group of your friends is nothing to be proud of. I recently exchanged emails with The Macallan distillery. Guess what? They have employed a new marketting strategy to cash in on the enormous [and hugely naieve] Chinese market and consequently, the quality of some of their products has suffered significantly. I am not a happy man. My pipe guy has a few Dunhills. When you pick them up they seem....well, perfectly ordinary. We have all heard the stories. We all know that for the same price, one can buy a much better pipe, albeit one without quite that classic reserved perfection. Yes, one can pick up a great deal whenever we are dealing with a naturally occuring product, or get a lemon from even the most conscientious maker, but the trick is to have a look at each and every pipe closely before one buys it and accept the variabilities. Even the most ardent porch-swinger must accept that the chances of getting a decent smoke from a Castello are higher than from a 'close-your-eyes-and-have-a-rummage' pipe.

 

[cigrmaster]

I got caught up in the beginning of my pipe smoking buying certain brands because of the names, it took me a number of years to figure out that no matter what the brand, you will have a few clunkers or for that matter tons of clunkers.

I now buy pipes from artisan pipe makers because my success rate has been close to 98 percent. I do not subscribe to the belief that certain factories deliver a superior smoking experience just because it has a certain name. I think you can get great smoking factory pipes from tons of different factories and that brand myth is a thing of the past.
I now buy my pipes from artisans I trust and have been extremely please with the pipes I am buying. I will take my Rad Davis and many other artisan pipes over any of the pipes I used to buy. Now yes I did get some very good smoking pipes from my list below. I even bought 2 artisan pipes that I did not care for but that was from a new carver I took a chance on so there are plenty of artican pipes with allegedly good names that sell pipes for my tastes that don't measure up.
Now I do need to preface my remarks by saying that my obsession with hand cut stems that fit my mouth to a tee and pipes that never need a pipe cleaner to soak up excess moisture is extremely important to me. My pipes have to be in a certain weight and size range and a fabulous blast is something I really enjoy.
The list below are all the pipes that I have had experience with.
Former

Matzhold

Rainer Barbi

Kurt Balleby

luigi Viprati

Poul Winslow

Castello

Dunhill

Ferdown

Ashton

Lane Era Charatans

Radice

Peterson

Upshall

Caminetto radice/ascorti era

Nording
Ardor

GBD

Sasieni

Savinelli

Peretti

SMS Meer

George Jensen

MM Cobb
Now among that list, there have been some terrific pipes and if I did not detest acrylic pipes and pipes that weighed over 60 grams I would probably still own plenty of them.
There are so many great pipes out there but for me, it took time for me to understand what I loved in my pipes.

 

[12pups]

McDonalds provides the best food? Really? Pancakes with the consistency of vulcanized rubber, better suited for a roofing material. Because THAT'S the basis of your argument.

Finally. I get to use the word "cute."
Had I said anything like that, I'd have written the first post to disagree with me.
Hanna's main point that "taste" can't be determined by brand, indisputable. And maybe sort of unnecessary. Has anyone in these forums ever argued against him on that? the blind-taste-test thing, anyone here said they could pick out the Dunhill? Everything else being said about brand, whoa. Of course brand matters.

Broad brush... Why not... You did, along with belittling and labeling anyone who might disagree with you.

What the...???

 

[numbersix]

I don't interpret him as negatively criticizing brands. I don't interpret him as saying: "Hey guys, fu&? the brands! A $10 pipe is as good, if not better, than a S. Bang or Bo Norh." I think it's an important distinction.

+1
This subject has many levels and I think the main gist of Hanna's argument kind of got lost in translation by some of us (myself included). I don't necessarily agree with some of his points, but all he really seemed to be saying is that no one should think they're missing a "magical" smoke unless they smoke an expensive name brand.
And I agree with that completely.

 

[pipedreamer]

All of your pipes, may they be great smokers, no matter where they came from, or who made them.

 

[pitchfork]

I don't believe in "great briar." Honestly, I don't think such a thing exists in so far as we're talking about smoking properties. There are a couple of ways to test this.
First, you could take a bunch of briar blocks, drill them with an identical chamber and stick an identical piece of plastic tube in them for a stem (like on Eltang's Popeye pipe) and see if any of them taste better than the rest.
Conversely, you could give someone like Rad Davis some blocks of pear and strawberry wood, or beech, and have him make some pipes out of them. I suspect they would smoke as well as any briar carved by Rad Davis.
What do I believe in? I believe in great stems, tasty stains, smooth airways. The briar just keeps the burning tobacco in place. Does it pick up ghosts that add to flavor? Sure, but it has nothing to do with the "quality" of the briar.
What could "quality" briar even mean, unless you're talking about grain and lack of flaws? I believe that what many people attribute to quality briar is really the product of quality stems and gurgle-free drilling.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

I taste the briar. I've had to get rid of one that just had a green taste. Some I like better than others, and I don't particularly like pipes that don't impart any taste or aroma.
But, there's also dissipation of heat, softer briar even slightly burns (yuck), and too hard of a briar could crack.
Dissipation of heat is what I imagine a lot of writers are referring to, as it can hinder the burning chamber's ability to stay lit. The briar is made up of tons of tiny tubes that divert the heat away from the core... eh, why am I trying to convince anyone. LOL. Sure, pitchfork, believe in what you want. Personally I believe sea monsters make the best pipes, lol. :wink: