The Marketing Genius of Samuel Colt
“God created men,” goes the famous frontier saying, “Colonel Colt made them equal.”
So how did one man, even a legendary arms-maker,
accomplish a task generally reserved for constitutions, wars and
philosophers? Well, the saying itself says it all: truly sensational PR.
More than any other man, he is responsible for fanning the flames of America’s passion for privately owned firearms.
If the name Samuel Colt, born 200 years ago on July
19, 1814, has become synonymous with guns, it’s no accident. It was
precisely his intention. The bearded industrialist may not have invented
the revolver whose design he perfected, but he was a pioneer in
everything from production lines to political lobbying to mass marketing
and celebrity endorsements, and, more than any other man, he is
responsible for fanning the flames of America’s passion for privately
owned firearms.
Like many top American entrepreneurs,
Colt eschewed traditional pathways to success, like attending college
or rising through the company ranks, in favor of convincing wealthy
friends and family members to capitalize his 22-year-old’s dreams. After
a brief stint at Amherst Academy went up in smoke thanks to a
pyrotechnic prank, the audacious Hartford, Conn., native was sent by his
father on the 1830s equivalent of an unpaid internship: a job on a
cargo ship bound for India.
“The husky, fast-talking industrialist from Connecticut,” Jack Kelly writes in The Invention of the Revolver, “embodied every European stereotype of the American: He was charming and abrasive, self-made and overbearing … as imaginative as he was mercenary, an opportunist, a liar, and a genius.”During the lengthy boat ride, Colt whittled a revolving pistol prototype out of wood, and after a spell as a traveling showman touting the benefits of laughing gas, the young huckster persuaded his family and friends to give him the $230,000 he needed to give the gunmaking business a shot.
Mad Man at Arms
SOURCE
Matthew Brady
He was also relentless. Colt’s quarter-million
dollar venture, indeed his first three ventures, all went under. While
the revolver provided a pivotal new advantage to American soldiers and
settlers — the ability to fire five to six shots without reloading, a
task that required 20 seconds with single-shot firearms — its $50 price
tag (equivalent to $3,000 today) was prohibitive for the average buyer.
Riding to Colt’s rescue was the savior of many a
weapons manufacturer: the federal government. Colt’s revolvers were held
in such esteem by Captain Sam Walker and his Texas Rangers during the
Seminole War that when the Mexican-American War flared up in the 1840s,
Walker helped convince the U.S. War Department to order 1,000 revolvers from Colt “to keep the various warlike tribes of Indians and marauding Mexicans in subjection.”
Colt was back in business — with a new
appreciation for both combat testimonials and government largesse. The
budding industrialist may have despised the federal hand that first fed
him — “To be … under the pay and patronage of Government is to stagnate
ambition,” he once said — but in a few years he was writing the book on
political lobbying, running up gigantic liquor tabs entertaining
politicians and military officers, while earning celebrity endorsements from the likes of Sam Houston, the Republic of Texas’s former president.
Colt capitalized on Americans’ romanticized view of the rugged frontier.
And trailblazer that he was, Colt
did not stop at U.S. politicians. He bestowed complementary arms on
world leaders from Czar Nicholas of Russia to the king of Siam, and won endorsements
from the likes of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Brigham Young. But Colt saved
his most effective marketing ploys for convincing average Americans to
pay a month’s wage for a device that required frequent maintenance and
was known to malfunction.
Colt capitalized on Americans’ romanticized view of the rugged frontier to sell pocket revolvers and other pistols — mostly to those who, like himself, lived in Eastern towns and cities. And to do so, Colt deployed a marketing and sales arsenal unlike any before.
Colt gave a custom-engraved and fold inlaid revolver to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire Abdülmecid I
He created a national network of sales reps, ran ads in newspapers with artwork by famous Western artist and adventurer George Catlin and even paid United States Magazine
to run a 29-page illustrated spread profiling his factory, which used
interchangeable parts and mass-production techniques more than half a
century before Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off an assembly line.
Colt was also well ahead of his time in giving his
products patriotic names like the Colt Navy Revolver, and, long before
the iPod and iPhone, he was whetting consumer appetites with slightly
modified models with customizable elements. He even coined the
expression “new and improved,” and got himself an honorary military commission and title of “colonel” to further boost marketing efforts.
By the start of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, Colonel
Colt’s revolvers were perhaps the best-known firearm in the world, and
when he died a year later from rheumatic fever at the age of 47, he was
one of the wealthiest men in the country. Yet Colt would not live to see
the explosion in private gun ownership following the war nor the
triumph of the iconic Colt .45 Peacemaker, “the gun that won the West”
and was used by every gunslinger from Jesse James to Billy the Kid to
Wyatt Earp.
But if he had, you can bet there would have been some endorsement deals and free product coming their way.
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