Inspiring Mobile Strategies

Fender creates digital tools to attract, educate and empower customers

The worlds largest guitar manufacturer built apps that empower beginners with high quality educational content and tools. They attracted 1,000,000 new customers in the first four months, creating a whole new subscription revenue stream and increasing retail instrument sales.

The Strategy

The canvas below attempts and convey the essential parts of the Fender mobile strategy. It is based on our own data sets, research and what is in the public domain. Disclaimer - this is our opinion, not that of Fender.

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Winning Aspiration

To support guitar players in all stages of their musical journey, enabling them to be the best they can be.

To create new digital revenue streams whilst doubling our guitar sales over the next three years, tripple customer lifetime value.

Pioneered by the world leading business strategist, Graham Martin, the Strategy Choice Cascade shown here is a useful way of communicating strategic choices.

Where to Play

Geography

Europe, UK, North & South America, Canada, Australia, Japan

Customer

Players of acoustic guitar, electric guitar, ukelele and bass guitar
Kids and young players early in their musical journey
Growing number of female players inspired by popular female artists, under-served in a male-dominated industry

Channel

Phone, Tablet, Desktop

Offer

Learn-to-play apps
Digital practice tools
Virtual product training tools

How to Win

Differentiation, based on...

Superior quality interactive lessons from industry gurus aimed at new customer segments, teaching musicians to play today's popular hits in byte size chunks appealing to all ages.
Complete set of tools that help players on a daily basis - tuners, backing tracks, chord charts and more. Offered free to grow brand awareness, would be expensive to buy.
Using our global retailer network to promote digital products. Offer discounts on instrument purchases to digital subscribers, driving purchases to retailers.

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What can you learn from Fender?

Fender have developed an incredibly successful mobile strategy with their Fender Play app. They gained just short of 1,000,000 new customers between March 2020 and June 2020, just four months. Of all those customers, 99% were new to the Fender brand.

Fixing the broken guitar-buying process

Customer research revealed that female players were on the rise due to the growing popularity of guitar-playing female artists. However, research revealed that female players didn't enjoy the guitar-buying process as instrument retail stores were male dominated.

Fender set out to solve these problems by executing this strategy. Essentially, they created educational tools that were appealing to young female players, and then used that to drive online sales.

Customer satisfaction

Fender Play - Learn is in the top 200 educational apps on the Apple App store and currently receives over 13,000 monthly downloads, the majority being Android users. Fender continue to invest in the app releasing 1-3 updates every month. It is also worth noting that the app achieves 5-star ratings showing Fender's dedication to quality and customer satisfaction.

Free apps to draw people in

Fender also developed a free app that offers real value to players, helping them tune their instruments, practice and compose music. They didn't take this lightly, the app has received considerable investment and is averaging 5-star ratings on app stores, similar to Fender Play - Learn.

It's app store optimisation puts it in the top 55 music apps on the Apple App store, and it receives over 80,000 monthly downloads worldwide each month.

For more information, see this blog post.

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