While we commonly think of newbie guitar players as teenage boys toiling away in their room, it turns out that the common cultural image of new guitarists is only half correct. In a recently released study in collaboration with consultancy Egg Strategy, the famed guitar company Fender found that women actually make up 50 percent of all U.K.-based beginning and new guitar players, mirroring the results of a study three years ago of guitarists in the United States. With this information, Fender plans on adjusting its marketing plans to better target these aspiring women guitar players.
Of the representative sample of emerging guitar players, in both the U.S. and U.K., women consistently composed half of the customer base for new guitar players. As Rolling Stone notes, while Fender has released information about women as new guitarists, the instrument maker has not released any additional data about age or other demographics. However, per Rolling Stone,
Fender’s study also found that 72 percent of guitar players pick up a guitar for the first time to gain a life skill or improve themselves; 61 percent also simply want to learn how to play songs by themselves or with close friends and family, as opposed to trying to make it big. And 42 percent say they view guitar as part of their identity.
Fender will use these findings to inform its marketing campaigns in the future. After receiving this study’s and the U.S.-based study’s findings, the company has begun to form relationships with female artists and has plans to highlight women in future ad campaigns. Though headlines have previously noted that the electric guitar is on its way out—prompting legendary guitarist Eric Clapton to note, “Maybe the guitar is over”—given that Gibson recently filed for bankruptcy, it seems as though Fender is trying to pivot and draw in this massive, untapped demographic to help its sales figures. For example, in 2016, the company sought to market toward millennials with a special guitar line focused on women-led bands like Warpaint and Bully.
As Fender CEO Andy Mooney told Rolling Stone,
The fact that 50 percent of new guitar buyers in the U.K. were women was a surprise to the U.K. team, but it’s identical to what’s happening in the U.S. …There was also belief about what people referred to as the ‘Taylor Swift factor’ maybe making the 50 percent number short-term and aberrational. In fact, it’s not. Taylor has moved on, I think playing less guitar on stage than she has in the past. But young women are still driving 50 percent of new guitar sales. So the phenomenon seems like it’s got legs, and it’s happening worldwide.
[H/T Consequence Of Sound]
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