There’s an old marketing maxim "sell the sizzle, not the steak," which suggests it’s easier to excite a customer with flash and razzle-dazzle than with substance. While this may work in the restaurant business, our customers are generally more interested in the steak than the sizzle. And no where is this more apparent than in our core connector accessory business - our customers want substance!

On a recent customer visit, I was asked to explain why Glenair would be a better long-term supplier/partner than one of our competitors. I was happy to be able to answer the question without having to resort to the "sizzle" of some gimmicky new product or the "excitement" of some cumbersome new distribution or marketing scheme. As you may have guessed, price and value were a big part of my response. Especially since Glenair is positioned to compete not only on price, but also on the value of better availability, faster turnaround and superior customer service. But more importantly, my answer addressed the concept of "freedom of choice" - for it is in this area that Glenair offers some major advantages over its competitors.

Freedom of choice means the ability to select from the complete range of standard accessory types and styles - with no pressure to settle for a design which doesn’t meet the exact needs of the application. While we are happy to recommend our favorites, we are nevertheless tooled and qualified on all the standard accessory technologies in use in the industry today. From Mil-Spec to commercial, from circular to rectangular, from composite to stainless steel - we offer the ultimate freedom of choice: every design in the book.

On the other hand, freedom of choice also means offering new solutions to the customer’s most critical interconnect problems. Whether the requirement is for advanced weight reduction, corrosion protection, bandwidth expansion, or package miniaturization - Glenair offers the freedom to select from the latest materials, designs and qualified products. Not content to just offer the tried and true, we’re advancing the art and science of the industry with hundreds of new designs every year.

Old or new, freedom of choice also means convenience in ordering - no hassles, no minimums, no waiting - and the ability to buy directly from the factory or to go through the biggest and best distributors in the business. At Glenair, we let the customer decide when and where to buy the product, not the other way around.

Finally, freedom of choice means availability. For every customer who has ever needed an accessory part number in a hurry, Glenair's Same-Day Inventory represents a special kind of freedom - the freedom to stop worrying about interconnect hardware and to concentrate on other, more pressing problems. And by the way, this freedom grows stronger every day, as we continue to build our Same-Day Inventory with bulk conduit and fittings, Micro-D connectors, fiber optic termini and a host of other popular interconnect part numbers.