If Nikon doesn't get their act together on DX...

Started Feb 7, 2013 | Discussions thread
Forum ProPosts: 11,105
Re: I don't know if Canon are doing better John...
In reply to malch, Feb 9, 2013

malch wrote:

jfriend00 wrote:

How does it hurt Nikon in the long term if warranties (which are by definition, not long term things) are not transferable?

Sure lock in != loyalty, but making it easy for a customer to leave early in their life as a customer doesn't create loyalty either. What creates loyalty is consistently releasing great products that meet your customer's needs, treating the customers well when something doesn't go right and maintaining compatibility/usefulness of previously bought Nikon things.

I think customers worry about the value of the assets they've invested in. If I purchase a new car, I look at what happens to the resale values over time. I've bought vehicles that demonstrably hold their value because that reduces my overall cost of ownership including depreciation.

Now I may not run the same kind of detailed analysis when I buy a new lens, but I do consider resale value.

Every time they deny a warranty claim because of the transferability clause it costs them some money and a lot of good will. A happy customer has to be worth vastly more to Nikon than an unhappy one.

Nikon already factored the cost of providing warranty service into the selling price of the product. So why not just repair the darn thing and create a happy customer versus an unhappy one?

Nikon is just really bad at creating policies to tick customers off. Warranty, grey market products, parts availability, etc. Thom's also been beating that drum for at least 5 years:


But, if you aren't regularly selling your lenses before the warranty expires, it ends up meaning nothing to you.  I still have all Nikon lenses I ever bought which is why I don't factor that into my Nikon lens purchase decisions.  This would only be meaningful if you didn't generally keep your lenses.  It's not like cars where some people only keep a car 2-3 years and always buy something newer where the resale value is a big part of the overall cost.  Unless you're a frequent lens trader (I don't know why one would be a frequent trader if they were an actual photographer), you're not selling your Nikon lenses very often.

Plus, my 200-400 is probably worth more than I originally paid for it new so it hasn't hurt me there.

It sounds like you have a beef about this transfer-ability thing.  My point was I don't think it affects very many user's loyalty.  It certainly doesn't affect loyal users who buy what they need and keep it for a long time.  The only users I can think of that are most affected are the ones that buy things they don't need and then need to resell them or switch brands.

As for the cost of the warranty, Nikon has factored in the historic cost of warranty claims which includes the fact that there are fewer claims because lenses sold early in their life are no longer warrantied.  They have no factored in the warranty cost of all lenses being covered for their entire warranty period.  They know there's a certain amount of warranty breakage due to resale and they plan their financials to that expected value.  Just like when company's offer rebates, they know that some percentage of rebates won't be cashed in and they plan to that percentage.

Yes, Nikon has been real bad with some customer relations things and policies lately - you won't get any argument from me there.  And, that has certainly hurt customer loyalty a lot (D800 focus issues, D600 oil spots, etc...).  I regularly see posts from people who say that IF Nikon does actually come out with a D400, they won't buy one for at least a year until all the issues get shaken out and they can find out if it's a lemon or not.  That is some serious loss of customer trust.  Their warranty/original owner policy is something separate which isn't new and hasn't hurt their brand and wouldn't fix the other ills even if they changed it.

-- hide signature --
Reply   Reply with quote   Complain
Post (hide subjects)Posted by
(unknown member)
Keyboard shortcuts:
Color scheme? Blue / Yellow