kato said:
Must've scarred that girl - at least a little bit - for life, being the object of hotness, and hearing "who's the dude with the fat ass?" JR: "Uhh, that dude is the girl sitting right across from you."
It was rather uncomfortable for her ;D . She was slender and much prettier from the front than back, but I did not pick her to be the model, she did. The girl we replaced her with had more back in back, and more recognizable curves.
Oh wives plural. That makes sense. Gotta watch the bottom line if you're expecting to get traded in for a younger model.
I'd rather not go into details, but yes some of that.
It's remarkable at a company as huge as Peavey that the product designer had a hand in the marketing. That would be unheard of in today's workforce.
While it may not be obvious but I do more than design. I was president of two different (very small) companies before being hired at Peavey in the mid '80s. I managed engineering departments, while I still dabbled in design. My last patent (as co-inventor) at Peavey was on a power amp heat sink, and well after I was working in product management. I would still brain storm with senior engineers as a diversion from my routine work. You can take the boy out of engineering, but you can't take the engineer out of the boy. 8)
At one time I was over the entire product management group with several product managers reporting to me. Product managers do far more than come up with ad campaigns, while the creative is supposed to come from the advertising department, they would have never in a million years come up with some of the ads I did (for better or worse).
I had major battles with the new director of marketing hired near the end of my time there and I am still angry about some things he did, or un-did. Peavey was not great at advertising and I found it difficult to fund a serious campaign, while doing hand to hand combat against tens of mackie mixer ads every month. I "engineered" an advertising program where I built an ad budget into the price of a new small mixer series, so something like $10 from every mixer shipped went to my ad budget, to promote just those mixers. It took time for this to gain traction because the advertising lagged the shipments but after about 6 months i was seeing nice increases in those SKU sales, when the new guy took my special set-aside budget to use for some other pet project of his. arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. So I ended up with $10 more expensive mixers than they needed to be, and no incremental mixer ads.... My little project was supposed to lead Peavey into a more effective advertising model by example, instead it got nipped in the bud, by an empty suit. :'(
JR
