HTSA Urges Vendors to Launch Products Simultaneously Through Best Buy, Specialists
In an open New Year’s letter to members of the CE industry Wednesday, Richard Glikes, executive director of Home Technology Specialists of America (HTSA), appealed to vendors to launch new technologies through the struggling specialty AV retail channel in 2011 following disappointing introductions of Google TV and 3D TV through the nation’s largest electronics retailer, Best Buy.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Prompted by word of Google TV being pulled from CES announcements, Glikes said “history repeats itself,” and questioned why “vendors make the same mistake time after time” by pushing new product introductions through the high-volume retailer. “First they manhandled 3D TV, which by all rights should have been an outright winner had it been demonstrated properly by veteran salespeople,” Glikes said. Google TV followed the same path, he said, with an “underfeatured Sony TV.” Citing Cisco Umi ads, which he called “really cool but a pricey way to communicate” face to face over the Web, he added, “my guess is that this too will languish."
Glikes’s solution is to give new technologies to Best Buy and “true specialists" simultaneously, which, he proposed, would help both sides. “We get our early adopter clients excited and the buzz begins,” he said, while Best Buy advertises the product and hauls in a net full of clients. Specialists can reinforce the value CE products, he said, saying recent instant rebate and bundling trends have cheapened the value of certain CE categories in the consumer mindset. “When is Best Buy going to tell vendors to stop instant rebates and bundles that make things like Blu-ray players appear to have no value?” he asked.
Specialty retailers have had an increasingly difficult time navigating the changing CE world, hit by Internet shopping, the economy, high-volume retailers, a changing customer base and shrinking margins. At last fall’s HTSA meeting in St. Louis, Glikes said specialists had collectively lost more than $100 million in revenue over the past two years and he urged members to take back that business, “less than two-tenths of one percent of Best Buy’s $56 million annual sales,” by becoming more digital (CED Oct 7 p3).
Glikes urged the industry to “whisper loudly to Best Buy” to help themselves, vendor partners, engineers and the industry to “let true specialists introduce the new gear at the same time.” Noting that New Year’s is a time for change and “not doing the same old thing,” he said, “Let’s make it happy by trying something new.”