Beginning in the mid-90s, retail analysts began talking about a shift in focus in in-store merchandising from simple product presentation to a more holistic store experience. New store concepts from Nike, Cabela’s and REI began to position retail stores as entertainment destinations where shoppers could interact with multimedia content centered around brand assets like new products, athletes and how-to information.
More than a decade later, many retailers have incorporated entertainment concepts into their stores. As you would expect, the strategy is also applicable online. Most brands with online direct sales platforms have merged the brand and product information approach of their pre-ecommerce websites with the nuts and bolts of presenting products and processing transactions online.
This non-product-content takes many forms, from travelogue look books at J. Crew to expedition videos at The North Face. Some brands, like Patagonia have created separate channels for their brand-related entertainment. In most cases, the content is keyed to specific products or serves a more general brand-building function.
Few retailers, however, take the pure entertainment approach, creating marketing content, like Super Bowl commercials, primarily to entertain. That’s why Backcountry.com’s Steep and Cheap email newsletter caught my eye.
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At first glance, Amazon’s new Kindle electronic book reader doesn’t seem to have much to do with the business of selling outdoor gear. But a recent TechCrunch article touched on an issue we’ve been wrestling with as we develop smarter ways to create dealer catalogs. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid is skeptical about the future of the Kindle as the killer app for college texts because of major shortcoming: note taking functionality.
But the Kindle’s real weakness is its highlighting and annotation functionality. In a real book, you can mark up your textbook and make notes to yourself in the margins. The Kindle lets you highlight and take notes, but the interface is painful to use with any kind of frequency - E-ink doesn’t lend itself well to quick navigation, nor does the Kindle’s joystick/button interface. From a student’s perspective, the Kindle is badly in need of a touchscreen. And while some students may initially grab the Kindle DX as soon as it comes out for the ‘cool’ factor, practicality (and cost) will rule it out for most of them.
Buyers tell us that the ability to easily mark up a workbook, make notes and sketch out a buy is the best thing about printed dealer workbooks. Until there’s a note-taking technology that makes annotating an electronic workbook as easy as marking up a paper one, electronic-only solutions won’t work for buyers or reps. In reality, the hurtle might be even higher: first we need a technical solution, then we need time for users to get used to it as a medium for note taking. And that could take a while, regardless of where tech takes us.
Every client we’ve ever done workbooks for (and we’ve done a lot of workbooks) has replied something like this when asked how many books they’d like to print:
“We’ll, I’m not sure. We printed x-thousand last year and we had a lot of boxes sitting around the warehouse. But the year before that we ran out. Uh, I’m not sure, let me ask Sales.”
As you can imagine, Sales will want to err on the side of surplus for safety and the topic is put on hold until the next season. What’s funny is that the number never seems to bear any relation to the number of reps, the number of accounts or the number of doors.
Given the state of everyone’s marketing budget, I imagine we’ll start to see some pushback from our friends in marketing departments.
“How many workbooks do you really need?” could be the mantra of S10.
Backpacker Magazine posted this to Twitter yesterday afternoon:
Newbie campers are coming—get ready for a crowded summer: http://tinyurl.com/d2o6gp
The link is to a blog post that in turn references this CNN piece on a potential boom in car camping this summer. Never mind the issue of newbies crowding out state-park regulars. A growth in car camping participation is welcome news for outdoor specialty retailers and suppliers. And Walmart. Uh, especially Walmart.
Chances are that the bulk of the newbies will be inclined to buy the sort of down-market camping goods available in the big box sporting goods and general merchandise stores. But there’s also a good chance the camping spike will manifest among more affluent consumers. It may even surface some ex-campers looking to get their game back. Both of these latter groups are likely to frequent a specialty retailer. The bottom line is that anybody who sells camping gear is likely to encounter more newbie campers than they would in a “normal” spring. So how do you make the most of this new traffic. Tips for retailers follow. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s possible that this is old news. I’ll confess that I haven’t read the Title Nine catalog in a while. There’s not much new to report except that they are showing some product using the dreaded Territory Ahead styling gimmick: clothing merchandised on hangers in unnatural places.
And, as best I can tell, they may have a new semi-logo. A number of Title Nine branded items are emblazoned with the Sherpani-esqe flower shown above.
While a careful parsing of the shapes will reveal a Title Nine “9,” what I see first is a Nike swoosh.
Sometimes you have to invent the ruler before you can take measurements. When marketers decide how to explain the merits of a product, they look for words and concepts that they think will be meaningful to their target audience. Clorox “kills germs” and “whitens fabric.” Quaker oatmeal is “heart healthy.” For many products, these concepts are a no-brainer. Consumers have built-in benchmarks (cleanness, healthfulness, taste, calories, etc.) with which to evaluate products. For some products, however, marketers have to invent those benchmarks before they can boast about how their products measure up.
David Pogue, the NY Times technology columnist, has a great piece on this phenomenon as it applies to digital cameras. In “The Myth of Megapixels,” he chronicles the rise of the megapixel count as the red herring of digital camera specs. It turns out that comparing megapixels won’t help you find a better camera. Picture quality is dependent on lens, circuitry and sensor quality. A megapixel count tells you how many dots the image has, not how good those dots are. Still, camera marketers push pixels and consumers have long ago accepted this as the benchmark for digital camera evaluation.
The outdoor market is full of similarly questionable benchmarks. Some are imperfect but generally accepted, like temperature ratings for sleeping bags. Some are scientific but unhelpful, like the air permiability rating (CFM) some apparel makers use to describe a fabric’s windproofness. Read the rest of this entry »
