Wouldn't it be Great if the Big Manufacturers did this!

When Atlas had their Forum up, other than My desire for a Milwaukee SDL39, the most common was a GP40 and GP40-2.

Dick

Good Evening,

Yes - Sounds good to me, with all the "Build to Order" going on.

Gary

• Cheers from The Detroit and Mackinac Railway

I'd go along with that.  You're right, it's a great marketing tool giving manufacturers a "feel" for what modelers are really interested in actually buying.  And yes, it would be beneficial to manufacturers regarding  Build To Order  as previously stated by trainroomgary.

Chief Bob (Retired)

I think it would be a great help if Lionel, MTH, Atlas and the rest had a wish list on their websites.

When Atlas O started their forum back around the turn of the Century, Jim Weaver posted a thread asking what us modelers would like to have. He received a ton of responses, one was my push for the Gunderson twin stacks, the other was my push for the Erie Builts. Both were done superbly. 

I believe he had 5 years worth of good new product requests and many of those seem to be popular and continue in thier prodcut line today.

Even a simple survey with properly worded questions would get them a ton of useful information.

For example, if they asked users to submit a list of their top three favorite road names other than PRR, UP, BNSF, NS, CSX, NYC, and Santa Fe, they could get a really good idea of what other road names would be good to catalog.

Andy

MTH had this, too.  I forget whether it was on the net or came out in print, but my

suggestion was a gas electric.  They did build one, but I don't thnk it was that successful.

One smaller company (whose identity is withheld out of respect for them) did a similar customer interest survey a few years ago only to be burned by the experience. Seems some customers overzealous to see an item made deliberately flooded and stacked the survey with replies bearing fake customer names to make it appear interest in the product they desired was greater than it actually was and so when the company produced that item in a quantity based on the phony numbers generated in the survey; the manufacturer was left holding the bag with slow moving inventory for an item which in actuality few people wanted! Since people can now get multiple email id's, the only way to verify a respondent's id and weed out fraudulent responses would be requiring the phone number of respondents and I'd guess quite a few of you folks who posted you favor the wish list/survey idea would balk at having to provide your phone number to the manufacturer.

Not in the least. Just log their IP address.

Stacking the deck is the only thing I see wrong with this idea.

I might be misinformed, Slugger, but if a person responded using the smart phones, tablets, laptops, and computers in their home, work, school, or over public wif'is - wouldn't they all have different IP addresses? Thus one person could still have tally up multiple responses?

MTH has a wish list/suggestions page on their Facebook page 

MTH also has it on their Web page.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Contact Us"

In the middle of the page is a drop down box that marked "Email Subject".

Open it up and one of the headings is "Product Suggestions". 

Nope, you're correct. Any system can be beat. You can hop around to different networks to acquire a new IP address (unlike a MAC address, which is uniquely assigned by the manufacturer to each device). I suppose it simply comes down to how much effort you want to exert to score multiple responses. I simply meant to point out that most survey software are not tracking you simply based on an email address you've entered, it's using a little bit more hardwired mechanism such as a combination of IP address/cookies. In fact, website developers are trying to get more sophisticated and use your browser's/computer's personalized configuration to track you (i.e. recording your browser, your browser plugins, what font you're using, screen size and resolution, etc, all this stuff which your device already freely provides to any website that requests it); this technique is called "fingerprinting".

Yes.

I have said it for years.

A new survey every year.

New people come and would like different thing or the same things than what has been produced in the past years. The random supply problem makes it hard to find some items.

Andrew