Strategy in TECH...
The next phase of the TV wars has begun in earnest now in the wake of Sharp’s (and Toshiba’s) CE Week Day 1 roll-out of 4K Ultra HD television. In a presentation full of bluster and gusto, Sharp threw down the gauntlet with its 70-inch, top of the line Aquos UHDTV selling for a cool $8,000.
Learn more about this flagship set below – and see what Sharp’s VP told us about which retailers will participate in the rapidly approaching roll-out for this new technology.
Results from a new survey released today verify what you may already know – or at least suspected – retailers will either stop or dramatically cut back on purchases from brands that choose to compete with them by selling directly to consumers on the Internet. And a lot of retailers feel this way…71% said they would stop or reduce spending with brands that chose to do so.
The Wireless Speaker and Audio Association (WiSA) announced on Tuesday that it has signed up several new members and a couple caught our eye – Gibson Guitar Corp. (now Gibson Brands) and Onkyo Corporation. Also joining the organization are loudspeaker manufacturer Dali and Australian distributor Amber Technology who markets a line of speakers called Accent Digital.
As a marketing strategist, I am often asked to help clients come up with promotional ideas. Consumer electronics can be a very promotion-driven business, so this is a common task for tech marketers. There are no “hard and fast” rules and often I will brainstorm with the client, his/her team, or outside contractors I often work with.
But no matter what kind of idea we come up with, I try very hard to avoid something that is a bit of a common practice in the technology business – promotions that “throw the baby out with the bathwater!”
In a move that technology blogger Gizmodo says marks the official death of 3D, it has learned that sports network ESPN will cease all 3D productions by the end of this year. ESPN 3D, which started in 2010 on largely a test basis, never really got off the ground – and as Gizmodo wryly noted, “won’t be broadcast in any dimension soon.”
Gibson Guitar announced on Tuesday that – in a bid to better reflect its growing family of products outside of the guitar category – it will be changing its corporate name from Gibson Guitar Corp. to Gibson Brands. While the move looks logical, there will likely be many who will bemoan the fact that the new name loses its ability to honor the company’s stringed-instrument heritage and still-important namesake product.
Perhaps another sign of the times, ProSource – the retail buying group that represents the combination of both Home Entertainment Source (HES) and PRO Group – held a meeting earlier this month centered on the topic of e-commerce. These meetings, held June 3-4 in Chicago, were to share trends and best practices in e-commerce for their members.
Strata-gee.com heard this week from multiple sources that Core Brands had completed the analysis phase of its sales force consolidation, and was now executing the termination of the losing reps – and the reassigning of brands to the winning reps. Core Brands, a division of Nortek, Inc., had announced the downsizing process in a conference call with their entire sale representative network on April 19th – laying out a process for which the desired result was to create a smaller network of fewer authorized sales representative companies presenting most, if not all, of the company’s ten brands.
Wall Street analysts are getting increasingly concerned about the ability of Apple, Inc. to sustain its historic run of innovation. Some are suggesting the company’s best days may in fact be behind it. Exacerbating the growing drumbeat of discontent…it has been eight months – since October 2012 – when Apple last announced new products. And even they were more iterative than innovative. Clearly feeling the pressure, over the last couple of months Apple CEO Tim Cook has told anyone who was willing to listen to hang on, great things are coming.
For many of today’s companies and marketers, whether business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B), email marketing has become one of, if not the, most potent arrows in their marketing quiver. There are many reasons why this is the case. Certainly, one reason is “cost effectiveness.” For a relatively low-cost, marketers can address large lists of email addresses with their targeted message. And thanks to fill-in-the-blanks message templates, email marketing is also fairly easy to create. And finally, once you “push the button,” email marketing is delivered almost instantaneously.
