Here's a hint for MTH...and Lionel,
Bring out good quality product, sell it at a fair price (a fair price is a price where you make money, and your customer feels like he or she got real value for the dollar), and above all, market the product properly and it will sell. It really is that simple.
If you don't believe me then please ask Scott Mann over at Sunset/3rd Rail, because it has been his business plan for quite a while.
I understand that tooling costs are high, and that production costs in China are rising, but the bottom line is still unchanged from fifty years ago--good quality product will sell, and flawed, low perceived value product will struggle.
MTH could bring out a complete line of TT scale product tomorrow, and it would sell just fine--if the product was judged to be a good value for the money. Conventional wisdom says that there isn't a market for TT scale, but conventional wisdom is often wrong--there's a ready made market for TT scale out there right now, because there are a bunch of HO model railroaders who wish they could model big steam with smaller radius curves, and there are a ton of N scale modelers who wish that those N trains weren't quite so small...and those two groups (and the people like me who sometimes like things that are just a bit different from the norm) equal a ready made market for anybody brave enough to fill it. S scale isn't one bit different, and Don Thompson proved it.
In model railroading it took a long time for manufacturers to figure out that the product creates the market. Some manufacturers still don't get it.
This "the market just isn't there" complex has been going on in this industry forever, and to prove it you can look at back issues of RMC in the early 1970's when almost every month some poor N scale modeler was writing to the editor that such and such locomotive wasn't made in N...and wouldn't it be a grest idea?
The response was always the same, and the inherent condescension was readily apparent in the reply, and it was always the same exact reply--model railroading is a small market, there aren't enough N scale modelers out there, you should feel lucky that anything is made at all, if you want product you should model in a real scale, come see us when you're grown up enough to appreciate HO...blah-blah-blah....
Does that sound familiar?
Then when Atlas, Kato, and Life-Like started making those unwanted locomotives the market suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and N scale went through a period of great growth. The product drove the market. The same thing happened more recently in On30...Bachmann essentially created that market out of thin air.
Imagine if you will a letter to the model railroading "experts" several years ago about your grand plan to produce a large quantity of Peter Witt streetcars in every major scale...how would that have gone over? Don't be silly--there's no market for that!
Jeff C
