Welcome to our forum.
Many shoppers are willing to travel to see and sit in different Hot Tubs, some as much as 100 miles away. The question I have is, what is the most common method of advertising that you respond to? There is one company in town that advertises on TV all the time. They buy canned ad footage that you see all over the country. Their store is really visible off a major interstate.Another company is famous for thier pink delivery vehichles and they even include that in thier advertising,which is less often, but they are directly on my route home from work. The thing they had in common was I knew at least one person who had bought from both and that I knew they had been around for awhile.The next dealer we went to was located close to the first one so we killed two birds with one stone. Finally, the store we bought from was sort of infamous in our area. Many years ago when Coach John Cooper was hired to replace Earl Bruce at Coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes football team he did a commercial for "Buckeye Spas" and the commercial went over like a lead balloon. The coach was criticized about not paying enough attention to his team if he had time to do such a commercial. Since then the only commercials OSU coaches do are tied into a local charity. But we remembered it and checked it out. We checked out one other at a home show.How long do you expect it to take, or did it take to find the right Tub? And, what was the deal clincher, how easy was it to make that decision? I found several tubs that I thought was the right tub but my wife didn't like for one reason or another. The two deal makers were they had the exact model in the exact color with the exact skirt we wanted and they were the first place to make an offer below what was posted on the literature. For some reason the other stores didn't take us seriously as buyers I think.
That being said, we decided that - hey - we should buy a tub. After scouring this board for advice, we began shopping around. Living in a small city, our choices were somewhat limited I feel. We also wanted a tub that was made in Canada. Immediately that eliminated many of the brands that are discussed on this board such as Hotspring, Jacuzzi etc. Knowing how cold it is here, I just couldn't accept a tub made in sunny California to handle the extremes our weather can produce. Knowing nothing about the hottub industry, I may be completely wrong. However, considering the massive difference in population between the US and Canada and the equally massive differences in temperature, I do not think it illogical to assume that the majority of tubs are produced to satsify the dominant market. Generally, this means - not Canada. For that reason we considered Beachcomber, Hydropool, Arctic and Polar Spas. While many of you dealers of the 'other' brands may be quick to argue the American product in Canadian winters, I have no working knowledge of your product to argue. I simply wanted to shop at home.Much of what I hear in this forum, and everywhere else in life is often based on second-hand, partial information that has been diffused through many different opinions before reaching my ears. What is important to me is working knowledge. Those who have direct working knowledge of the product are a valuable resource. This is problematic as there are few of those people here on this site. While I can understand that shady sales tactics by ANY salesman are dishonourable, the people at Arctic were just as terrific as Beachcomber. There was no pressure (not that I would fall to it), just good information. At no time was I told ANY of the fallacies that continue to re-emerge on this site - such as no heater needed etc. Also, Arctic was well aware that we were shopping around and that Beachcomber was their closest competitor - and there was no attempt to slag their product in order to elavate their own. In fact, the dealer was quite sure that Beachcomber made a very good tub.