NY Times: Off Target On Ammunition Branding

Americans buy about seven billion bullets a year. This year, the ammunition business is booming more than ever, with some shortages reported.

And while shortages make buying a favored brand over "whatever you got" less important, branding is still important within the ammo business. It's easiest to think about ammunition brands much the same way one would brands of batteries or gasoline: commodities. So branding is more important than ever, even if Rob Walker missed the point -- that gun-owners prize performance, not just image --  in his column in yesterday's New York Times Magazine.

Many attribute the run on ammo to rumors that the current administration will ban the sale of assault rifles -- though this doesn't make a great deal of sense, since the most popular caliber appears to be for handguns (9mm, .45 .38) and the general .22 rounds, all of which will still be widely available regardless of an assault rife ban. And because ammo sales were bounding upward years before Obama's election, some dealers have attributed the shortages to shortages of brass, copper and lead created by the skyrocketing industrial consumption of nations such as Brazil, China and India.

Walker sees ammo's branding task as similar to any other industry:

On some level, all stories of successful brands resemble one another: the competitors in some category of good or service seem interchangeable until one of them, often a newcomer, dreams up some way of standing out from the crowd.

According to Walker, this leaves ammunition brands to differentiate on "advertising, packaging and other image-enhancing strategies," rather than the performance-based product attributes that gun owners prize. Though he reports advances like ammo-maker ATK's Black Cloud's new shell design technologies, he seemingly dismisses the potential branding benefits: "Still, technology by itself is not a marketing strategy."

Sure, not technically. But such advances offer the strongest marketing hook a commodity brand has. In analyzing the ammo industry's branding strategy, Walker seems stuck instead on "image," even offering a handy color-coded graphic that purports to demonstrate: "Ads on Hunting Shows + Fancy Packaging + Webisodes + Celebrity Endorsements = A New Ammo Brand."

But by characterizing ammo as an "afterthought purchase," largely devoid of meaningful branding cues, Walker shows his lack of understanding of the gun market. "After all," he writes, "we’re talking about ammunition, not a lifestyle accessory." Here, he couldn't be more wrong.

Listing the methods ammo brands use to build themselves (TV, webisodes, package design), Walker misses online message boards, which are a huge resource for what is basically word-of-mouth marketing. Discussions at buckmasters.com, defensivecarry.com, and fieldandstream.com about brands of ammunition are anything but trivial:

A buddy of mine reloads me some AWESOME 300 win mag shells with the Barnes TSX (tipped tripple shock) 180 grain bullets. I have dropped every deer in his tracks that I have shot with this bullet.

Or:

my 5906 is as finickey as Oprah off her diet....It will NOT take UMC or WIN 115 FMJ's....I have to feed it Wolf!

Indeed, what an afterthought.