You know a manufacturer is smelling a market opportunity when it hires an aging rock star to promote its products at a staged event at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Go to the Energizer web site for hearing aid batteries and you will be treated to news of Mick Fleetwood “teaming up with Energizer® to drum out an important message for his fans’ hearing health — how to keep rockin’ responsibly.” Did I say Energizer, the battery maker, is spending this kind of money? That’s right. When I did marketing work for Hewlett-Packard’s printer business, the excitement was always in the latest new ink jet printer, but the profits would come later from years of sales of disposable ink cartridges totaling hundreds or thousands of dollars per printer. Same thing when another client, Gillette, would announce a new razor and sell only one or two razors per consumer but look forward to selling hundreds of blades. Now we’ve got hearing aids and batteries. The hearing aid manufacturers are always complaining about slow growth in demand for their products, but makers of the disposable hearing aid batteries that you must replace on a weekly basis are seeing a big opportunity and spending major marketing dollars to get their share of the business.
The concert Mick Fleetwood hosted at the Hall of Fame last week was the latest event in Energizer’s “It’s Hip to Hear” promotion, which launched in 2003 featuring Pat Benatar as its national spokesperson. The site is worth a visit, because Energizer has paid a lot of attention to the details. There are a number of very useful links to organizations that can help aging baby boomers deal with their hearing loss, starting with their denial about hearing loss. One of them, H.E.A.R., Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers, is an excellent non-profit group that’s been educating people in the music business for years about the perils of noise-induced hearing loss. Energizer also partnered with A.S.H.A., the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, on a survey of baby-boom-generation hearing loss issues as well as a Hearing Health Survival Guide that can be downloaded from the Energizer site.
This kind of effort only helps accelerate acceptance of people in their 40s and 50s to the idea of getting assistance for their hearing loss. Baby boomers’ denial is a big part of the problem, so education and promotion of hearing health issues is important. Therefore it’s disappointing we don’t see the same effort from the other leader in the hearing-aide battery market, Duracell, which lists its hearing aid products under “specialty” batteries on its web site but provides precious little consumer information, compared to its archrival Energizer. One difference from the printer-and-ink or razors-and-blades markets is that the battery makers provide standard products for all the hearing aids out there. HP ink cartridges are so profitable because HP printers only work with HP ink cartridges, just as Gillette’s razor blades only work with Gillette razors. But hearing aids take standard batteries, so consumers aren’t locked into either Energizer or Duracell. So the two battery makers constantly slug it out for consumers’ attention. Right now, Energizer’s got mine.