Word of Mouth

Everyone knows that word-of-mouth is the best advertising - and for 3 reasons: it's free, it's effective, and friends are very influential in purchasing decisions. My staff recently bought tickets for my wife and me to the "Joseph" Sound&Light presentation at the Millenium Theatre, Lancaster, PA. We were amazed at the quality, the multi-media effects and live animals used in the show. There in the middle of Amish country, with horses and buggies frequenting the countryside, was a 2000 seat theatre with three shows daily and busses coming from miles away to see a play that is booked out for weeks/months ahead. And no advertising. How do they do it? Word of mouth. I don't know how they'd cope if they advertised!
While we were in PA we picked up a nice present - a large screw in a back tire. Since the tire stayed inflated as it "thump-thumped" we gingerly drove to the nearest Pep Boys (they've been advertising on TV a lot recently). After a bit of a wait, they fixed the tire with a plug - at NO CHARGE! How come? "We just enrolled you in our Rewards Club at no charge - it's one of the benefits, free fixing of flat tires" SO - here I am spreading their service with word of mouth - VERY effective!
I hope Saelig customers do the same with our products. We've heard about some from time to time. Daniel M wrote: "Several electronics bloggers mentioned independently how happy they were with your 'scopes. If all goes well with this order I will be buying lots more! Thanks." Another customer wrote to us saying he would definitely spread the word when he opened his order for a Rigol scope to find a free instrument case inside (we give away free cases with each Rigol scope we sell. This surprise produces referrals that we enjoy!

ESC San Jose

Great to see so many customers at ESC in San Jose last week on the Pico booth -even customers from our early days of 20 years ago! The display of various scopes, loggers and probes/clamps caught the eye of many engineers and opened the door to some detailed application discussions. For others, the large PicoScope and Saelig banners provided needed brand recognition to passersby. Many people acknowledged familiarity with Saelig and/or Pico Technology, though we were surprised to find more than a few that hadn’t even heard of PC-based scope products -we’ve got additional marketing work to do! We distributed almost the entire supply of Pico datalogger and scope product family brochures.

We spread the available products over the two tables and ended up utilizing a portion of one of the tables to display three new, unreleased touch-panel PCs from our partner Comfile - whose president brought the devices from Korea. .

I canvassed the crowd and drew people in with queries about needs and applications, often tempting them with “healthy anti-oxidants” (Hershey’s chocolates). We had the PicoScope application demo running on a laptop which we used frequently to introduce them to the PicoScope GUI. We were surprised at the number of inquiries for native Mac and Linux s/w. Predictably, quite a few visitors were asking for performance in the range of 500MHz. Always more for less. No surprise, right?