The Tendo View

Several weeks ago I needed to buy a replacement electrical relay to address a problem with the power steering in my track car, a Toyota MR2 Turbo. Although there was a 90 percent probability that the relay was the source of the problems I was experiencing, I was reluctant to spend a couple hundred dollars for a factory relay if this wasn’t the culprit.

I turned to the message boards and a fellow MR2 enthusiast posted a link to an equivalent part that I could order online for $5 from a company called Digi-Key Corporation. A few days later, the nondescript electrical connector arrived in a padded manila envelope and, although it worked, it proved that the relay wasn’t the culprit after all. I felt rather smug for not spending hundreds on a misdiagnosed problem and moved on to troubleshooting the rest of the system.

About a week later, just days after our son’s first birthday, my wife and I received a slip from our post office letting us know that a parcel was waiting for us. We hadn’t ordered anything recently,  so we assumed someone had sent a gift for his birthday. After I waited in line to claim my parcel, the clerk slid across the table a massive, 6-pound, 2,775-page catalog from Digi-Key, the company that sold me the $5 electrical relay. On its cover, the manual promised “465,000+ Products In-Stock,” as well as “440+ Supplier Partners” and “Over 30,000 New Products Added.” It was too big to fit in my mailbox, so the postal carrier had scribbled our address with a sharpie on its spine.

I had never ordered from this company before and had no real need to ever order from them again. As best I could tell, it was a veritable treasure trove of arcane electrical component parts for engineers. But here I am, a humble marketer, holding in my hand 2,775 pages and 465,000+ products worth of ceramic capacitors, microcontrollers, inductors, oscillators, and thermistors.

Clearly, the folks at Digi-Key saw my potential to purchase additional items. However, between the cost of printing this monolithic parts catalog and the mailing fee associated with it, even if 100 percent of my $5 purchase was profit, this follow-on didn’t make sense. By my estimate, it put them in the hole to the tune of $15 to $20. Worst of all, the likelihood of my purchasing from Digi-Key in the future was no better or worse after its investment in me than it was previously.

In a recent post, I discussed how Smart USA made nominal investments in its purchasers through branded swag and token offerings that, in the context of a $12,000 to $20,000 vehicle purchase, were both proportional and effective. The company took an interest in us, its buyers, by finding out that we liked to gather for weekend drives and outings and helped facilitate those with add-ons like gift cards for gas, Starbucks, and Barnes & Noble that helped encourage our adventures. Hats and shirts bearing the word Smart (who wouldn’t want to be identified as that?) cost them very little and turned early buyers into walking, talking billboards for the brand. Bit by bit, we unwittingly became Smart’s word-of-mouth sales force.

Digi-Key on the other hand? Well, not so much (although I do have a nice doorstop for my office). Would I recommend Digi-Key to anyone who was in the same predicament as I was? Absolutely. Did the mega catalog help mobilize my evangelism? Not one iota.