Know-How Exchange : Strategy

When selling technology based products (especially where a substancial outlay of money is involved) you need to make certain your customers know how the support mechanism works. If there should be a problem, who will assist with troubleshooting? If their best efforts fail, what is the next step?

If you have advertising dollars to spend I would begin answering those questions for your potential customers.

Instore communications can help:

A large instore display showing features and benefits and 800# or whatever service.

A digital display screen, a guide that customers can browse through attached to the display area. A voice activated button explaining the product and the service etc.

Basically you are changing behavior. Give them a reason to change.
Whats in it for them if they buy at the hypermarket? Is it lower priced?

K

I personally would perceive hypermarket-based IT systems as 'cheap' and possibly unreliable. I'd need to feel that the store has a reputation for selling IT products. For that reason I'd not just be selling the computers, but would surround them with practical products like ink cartridges, leads, DVD-ROM, ink jet printers etc that give credibility to the good quality low price message that you want to support.

Also by having these lower price items in the store, you will attract visitors from the specialists who may then trade up.

I'd also agree with the good packaging idea and you can build in an no quibbles 'easy-to-return' policy. I'd also be strengthening the brand with POS display that tells the buyer they are purchasing a market leading product.

hi there

great inputs from others. my 2 cents...

why consumer are not coming to your hyper market, is it bcoz of consumers are not aware of it or is it bcoz people dont get the price they want.

you first need to understand why your sales is not picking up. then you need to design your activity to increase sales.

some of my ideas to increase sales without knowing the exact reason...

arrange an IT Carvinal in your hyper market chains and do the following...

# make sure you do give a convincing discount (like you mentioned BestBuy) for your major items/products/brands. make sure the offer you give in your campaign will not be available to other computer retail outlets.

# you also need to carry items which are top-up purchase like printer cartridge, DVDs etc so that your footfall increases and WOM spreads

# ensure that you have adequately trained sales persons who will be able to handle any and all queries of prospective buyers

#do create a mechanism to ensure after sales service, with an "Easy-Replace-Policy"

# last but not the least your carvinal gotta be well communicated to the consumers to increase footfall and ultimately

hope this helps

cheers!!

Branding is your best weapon and threat. You need to brand yourselves by being the best in the industry or country. You will not achieve this by advertising that you are the best but by both being the best in terms of products, support, after sales service you just need to be outrightly superior in comparison with your competitors then you will not need manpower to advertise yourselves

The problem is you are unknown and consumers are scared of buying because they know from big brand advertising that "they get what they pay for".

Their risk is the product fails and the hypermarket cannot fix it, and you are nowhere to be found when that occurs.

Remove the risk with longer than your competitor's warranty periods backed up by a well-known and reputable third-party hardware repair organisation, 24/7 help desk numbers, and excellent help desk support.

Remember too, that once upon a time, Dell was an unknown brand name.