Ah, the Guild conundrum... I managed a guitar store for 11 years ('77-'88) and we were franchised dealers for Guild, Fender, Gibson, Ovation, Takamine, Martin, etc. My experiences lead me to a couple of main reasons Guild is "the underdog". First, the company has never had good marketing except for the tail end of the '90s and very early '00s (under FMIC of all things). The advertising always seemed out of date and amateurish, no matter the era. Eric Clapton with his Cream-era Bob Dylan do playing acoustic- no one cared about Clapton's acoustic playing in those days. They couldn't even really capitalize on John Denver's very prominent use of Guilds. Minimal investment in advertising, and having endorsements that always seemed off hurt them. Graham Parker and the Rumor, K. K. Downing holding an X-79 in a fake "rock-star" pose. The '68 catalog seemed to have the biggest stars they'd had since Johnny Smith almost 10 years earlier with Tommy Smothers, Richie Havens, George Benson, and the classic Clapton shot. But after that none of the catalogs nor ads ever showed respected endorsers until the Jaco Pastorious ad for the Pilot bass, and that was well after Jaco's unfortunate descent into bi-polar had tarnished his reputation.
FMIC's push got some decent endorsers, and a lot of publicity. They bought ads in guitar magazines, they pushed the company's legacy, and they encouraged dealers to actually stock the products. I suspect they over-pushed dealers because locally every Fender dealer became a Guild dealer, and had a LOT of stuff on the wall. The store in town at one time had two F-412, a couple of D-40 and D-50s, F-50, F-50R, at least three F-47, three SF-4, two SF-3, and two X-175 and an X-500. That's a LOT of inventory for this market area, and it's a lot of stuff that's not going to turn quickly. And the two dealers within 40 miles had similar levels of stock.
Now here's the other thing about Guild. Most people don't walk into a store wanting a Guild guitar. They come in wanting a Martin, Taylor, or Gibson. The store has to work to sell a Guild- you have to take time to present it to the customer correctly, you have to spend time with the customer discussing their preferences and encouraging them to look beyond the name. And that's just not what guitar stores do any more. Especially Fender dealers- face it, most people walk in looking for a Strat, or a Tele, or a Jazz Bass. And so all the sales person needs to do is figure out how much money they can extract from the transaction and steer the customer to the right price range. If that same sales drone who's built a method of getting sales by taking orders instead of actually SELLING has a customer come in looking for a Taylor because they've just watched the Academy of Country Music show and saw Taylor Swift et. al., they aren't going to try to make a connection for that customer to a Guild. The sales staff is going to take the customer right to the Taylors.
And a lot of dealers got burned by the large influx of Guilds FMIC promoted. They bought a bunch of guitars that took more work to sell, and they had dead inventory. So they had to blow them out, and that's bad. Sure the folks who bought them were happy, but the dealer isnt' going to restock them because they didn't make money off of them.
Add in the stupidity of the guitar rumor mill that doesn't know squat about Guild- the stories that "Fender ruined them", that the production has been moved three times in ten years, etc. It's a hard sell. And given the Wal-Mart business model that the music industry has descended into, it's not likely that they'll ever be a big player again. FMIC still respects the line, but they've got to be careful how they market them in order to continue the legacy.
John