Garmin’s latest ad for opencaching.com is turning up the rhetoric. This might be a nice ad but I think Garmin is missing the point. Quality caches are the best way to attract users. Here is the ad as it appeared in the latest issue of Outside magazine.
opencaching ad in outside magazine
Garmin continues to attack Groundspeak on the issue of price. I don’t think this is the best approach for Garmin. Have you ever heard the adage: “you get what you pay for”? I learned early on in my sales career that if you sell on price you will lose on price. Groundspeak does offer a free service to cachers. The $30/year premium service is a reasonable price to pay for the great value you receive. I’ve stated before that my premium membership at Groundspeak is the least expensive item in my annual geocaching budget. I spend more in batteries than I do on my premium membership.
Garmin continues to improve their listing service. The recent addition of saved searches is another challenge to value of geocaching.com’s premium service. The ability to run pocket queries has long been one advantage of the paid service at geocaching.com. Garmin is not letting up on their improvements. Every month sees a new feature added to the site making it more user friendly. This will continue to force Groundspeak to keep pace.
Garmin can have better ads. They can even have a user friendly site. They can do that and more but that is not what will motivate a cacher to use their site. The quality of opencaching.com as a site will be measured in the quantity and quality of caches listed there. Cross posting cache hides on opencaching.com and geocaching.com does little to help grow the site. The entrenched base of users at geocaching.com are not about to switch to opencaching.com because it offers 5000 cache downloads with one click. How does that help a cacher if they can already get 4990 of those caches on geocaching.com?
Groundspeak continues to offer the most comprehensive geocaching listing site in the world. Groundspeak has accrued tremendous brand loyalty in its 10 years of operation. Garmin’s only hope of attracting those loyal users is to offer more or better caches than can be found on geocaching.com. I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Photo courtesy of Brenda at SWOG.
teamvoyagr
I have been writing the cachemania blog since 2008. I'm interested in the development of geocaching and the many ways that people play the game.
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7 Comments until now
opencaching is a lot of talk… no action. For instance, my analysis of this ad:
#1 – Yes – It is free.
(https://forums.opencaching.com/subscription.php )
#2 – So far, it has not run “well” for me.
#3 – same as #1… although there is a feature for subscriptions
#4 – NO – alteast i cannot find this button on any of the pages I can get to without the site crashing…
#5 – Not really – no review process as far as I can tell, although you can write OC and tell them that a particular cache violates the guidelines … using a “mailto” of all things.. how very 1990s…
#6 – well then why would you need to pay for advertising?
#7 – NO – Garmin has supported our mega-event every year but this one.
#8 – NO.. not yet atleast!
#9 – NO (see 8)
#10 – Shall it? Dost though bite your thumb at me sir?
Very utterly disappointed by this site. big lead up, and fail. I really wish they had got it right – opencaching.us is a far better site…
The advertising is leading the cart before the horse… though the horse seems half dead and the cart is missing a wheel…
The review process is not promoted heavily. There is a link on the bottom of the home page called “review”. From there you can vote yes or no as to whether or not the cache is following the guidelines. There is a timeline on voting for caches. If it gets no votes one way or the other it will go live.
Ah! just found the review process, and subsequently broke it….
There are no swear keys on this keyboard that adequetly express my annoyance and frustration…
also found the API – though it just leads me to a page that does not load…
Juicepig,
I’m sorry to hear that the site hasn’t been working for you. I’m going to send you an email. Hopefully you can give me a few more details so we can get these problems fixed asap.
I recently blogged about this as well. My issue was how many of the caches I looked at were ones already on geocaching.com. How does that make you a competitor? It doesn’t. The reality is that anyone going to challenge Groundspeak really has to have a good plan and I don’t think the plan here was good enough. I don’t understand why Garmin wanted to do this. Why not try and somehow partner up?
Personally I don’t care what site it is on if there is a cache, I want to find it. Competition is always good.
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