Asterix chez les Bretons – a lesson in market management

The first was that the annual school exchange visit to France attracted three girls for every boy and the prospect of two weeks in another country, away from my parents and surrounded by French girls was worth learning a few irregular verbs for.

The second aim, and probably one in which I made more progress, was that I wanted to read the Asterix books in the original, rather than in translation.

Looking through market statistics for consumer electronics sales in the UK, reminded me of the famous opening of each Asterix book.

In my loose translation this read: “In 50BC all Gaul was divided into three parts. All? Well not exactly. One small village is still fighting the Romans..”

Sales of consumer electronics seem to have declined year on year from 2012 to 2013 in all categories. All categories? Well, not exactly. One small distributor has found some categories which are still growing.

A previous blog entry was about the ‘wearable computing’ category and covered the market in activity monitoring devices like Fitbit and GPS enable watches, such as those being launched this summer by TomTom.

The second growth area which Widget sees is for improvements to the sound quality associated with television. In the past ten years most people I know have upgraded their television for one with a larger, flatter and higher definition picture. But as the picture quality has improved, the sound quality has got worse.

Adding a soundbar or a surround sound system not only improves the experience of watching a concert or a film, but also makes the dialogue clearer in complicated dramas. Have you ever had to rewind a television show because you failed to hear a vital snippet of dialogue? You might get it first time with a soundbar.

Orbitsound, our flagship product in this market, is a British soundbar which gives an astonishing surround sound effect without taking over your whole front room with cabling and speakers. The new M9 and M12 compete on quality with brands such as Bose or Sonos. The older T12 and T9 products will be coming back into mass merchants later this year at very keen prices.

Some reviews of the new Orbitsound model can be found on another previous blog entry

Whether you view app-controlled devices as a tool or as a toy, there is no doubt that these products are one of the growth stories of this year.

The SPY-C Tank can be controlled by an Apple or Android smartphone or tablet. Its built-in digital camera transmits a live image back to your phone or tablet which allows you to control and view what the tank is doing, even if it is in another room. The moving head allows you to look around the room. You can also record the motion footage or take a snapshot image which will be recorded directly onto your phone or tablet.

Taken as a whole, the EMEA market for consumer electronics will be either flat or decline slightly in 2013. But within that overall trend, there will be categories of products which grow in sales.

As a distributor in the UK, a market where consumer spending will continue to be tight this year, there are two areas of growth which we can see in our market. The first is wearable computing which monitors fitness, health, activity or other bodily functions.

Richard Holway is one of the top analysts on news from the IT sector and I have stolen the title of this theme from him.

“I’ve been writing about ‘wearable computing’ for several years now,” he wrote recently, “but I think I am now sure enough to declare 2014 as “The Year of Wearable Computing’. Indeed it will probably be earlier – H2 2013.”

In fact, wearable computing seems to have started already. Widget distributes Fitbit, a wearable activity monitor which has been selling in the UK since January 2012. It has done well in 2012 and sales in 2013 are clearly going to be at least double those of last year.

Nike started selling the Fuelband in Europe last spring and Garmin has been selling its fitness watches through sports and camping outlets throughout 2012 as well. This year will see competitor products from Withings, new players such as Misfit, and Jawbone who have just bought a startup called Body Media presumably to improve on the poor performance of Jawbone’s original product in this area.

Further into the crystal ball, Apple is rumoured to be developing an iWatch. Taking the market for these products as a whole, I can imagine that 2013 sales of these products in EMEA will be up by several hundred percent on their 2012 levels.

As Holway says “The killer application is ‘health’..it will start with the very healthy wanting to use it whilst jogging/cycling/hiking etc. But it will soon be deployed for the ill/old too – a huge market.”

Crucially this is a product category which will increase the size of the overall computing market, unlike the tablet computer market where every hundred pounds spent on tablet computers replaces more than a hundred pound’s worth of laptops and desktops.

A few weeks ago, a friend mystery shopped a store for an Orbitsound soundbar. He reported that the enthusiastic sales person told him that if he bought today, he would get a free optical cable to connect it to a television, worth £29.99.

Perhaps this is a sales benefit which we have not stressed enough – the good news is that all the Orbitsound soundbars, the new M9 and the M12, and the T series they replace, include this cable free of charge in every box, along with the red, white and yellow cables to use on televisions which have no optical output.

The M9 and M12 also have a wireless sub-woofer and connect to music sources via Bluetooth, with this feature replacing the old style iPhone docking station on the T series.

Sound quality has also improved still further – as Trusted Reviews reports in a five star review.

“The Orbitsound M9 is an improvement in terms of sound quality and flexibility over its predecessor, the T9. Our fears over Bluetooth were proved largely to be irrelevant and the flexibility it gives you is a worth any minor loss in audio quality. With room-filling sound, high-quality sound and it’s amazing spatial stereo technology this remains the best mini soundbar you can buy”

Read the full report from Trusted Reviews: Such a small soundbar shouldn’t sound this good…..

Macworld also went for five stars. “The result is pretty impressive,” it said.“The large subwoofer provides really strong bass output, and there’s a separate volume control on the subwoofer, so you can adjust the bass for different types of music.”  

Read the full review from Macworld: Compact Bluetooth speaker with a mighty sub-woofer.

One of the issues which business resellers face in recommending products which sell both to the business user and to the consumer is the danger that a potential customer may find the product they have recommended at a lower price on the internet.

Two new TomTom business models are designed to exclusively for business to business resellers. Not only are the range of features and benefits built into the products tailored to the needs of the business user, the products will be sold, though Widget UK, only to approved b2b resellers who will thus be able to make sales, safe in the knowledge that they will not be undercut by outlets with lower service levels.

The two new units are

Via Business EU45 (Part number 1EQ405403)
Go Business EU45 (Part number 1ER400225)

Both include a full 3 year warranty direct from TomTom, so an investment by a business customer in TomTom is guaranteed to deliver for 3 years without a single penny in extra expense.

The Go 820 Business also comes with 3 years FREE Live services, which is 2 years over what the consumer can buy in retail and worth an additional £95 (years 2 and 3 would be £47.50 for the subscription).

Neither product is available on the consumer market either on the high street or the internet.

Mayotte – home of the .yt domain
(c)  Ilya Varlamov zyalt.livejournal.com

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported Stacey King, the Amazon senior corporate counsel as writing to ICANN, the domain name authority, asking “Why should a company be able to own widget.com and not .widget?. There is no evidence that past ‘closed’ domains have led to any market power.”

Now I am sure that the learned counsel from Amazon did not have us in mind when she wrote that line, but Widget does in fact own widget.com.

We own widget.com and widget.co.uk, but the last thing I want is a constant plethora of new domain names.

Barely a week goes by without some email winging its way into my inbox saying something along the lines of “we are the registrars for the .z!! domain name and someone else has tried to register widget.z!!. Act now to secure this name by paying us $$.”

I put up a fight and reclaimed the Twitter handle @widget (which was possible because we owned the trademark Widget not the domain name).

I registered the shortened domain Http://widg.yt for use in shortening tweets. (And top marks if you knew that this came from Mayotte)

But apart from these forays, I have tended to leave other domain names alone and I can confirm that owning widget.com has not led to any undue market power on our side.

Mark Needham presents John Cleland, CEO of Maplin, with the European Retailer Award on behalf of Distree.

At the DISTREE conference in Monaco last month, Maplin won the award for European Retailer of the Year.

Unfortunately the conference is arranged so that the awards dinner takes place on the Thursday night after the end of the work sessions. Most of the UK delegation took this as an opportunity to fly home that night so that they could get a day’s work in on Friday but I sought any excuse to avoid coming back to a freezing cold London and enjoyed a fabulous dinner at the Monte Carlo Sporting.

By the time Maplin was announced as the winner of the European Retailer of the Year award, I was one of the few Brits still standing, despite having had toasted a few vodkas with the Russians on the next table when they won an award themselves.

At the end of the show I staggered over to the organisers and promised to bring the trophy home and present it to John Cleland, CEO of Maplin, which I did in London last week.

It was a pleasure to congratulate John and all the team at Maplin for this recognition of their success.

Last week  Fitbit announced the latest version of its Android app which makes it the first device in its market to include Bluetooth synchronisation with the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Note 2.  The market for connected mobile fitness devices is growing rapidly and this latest announcement links what is probably the most popular fitness device in this country to the most widely sold Android phones.

Fitbit’s activity trackers are small devices which clip onto your clothing throughout the day, monitoring how many steps you take and how many floors you climb. If, like me, you spend too many hours sitting in front of a computer screen, the information these devices feeds back to you can nudge you into doing a little more exercise, as can the feature which allows you to compete with friends and family.

The Fitbit Ultra, which was launched in the UK in January 2012, synchronised the data it collected via a wireless charger and stand which plugged into a USB socket on your desktop computer. Each time the device came within wifi range of this charger, data would upload to the Fitbit website.

The Fitbit Zip and One, the new Fitbit models launched in the run up to Christmas, synchronised with an iPhone App via Bluetooth from the start. I moved from the first generation device to the second generation device and saw at first hand that it was easier to synchronise data through a smartphone.  The new Android app brings this same benefit to the very large market of Galaxy S3 and Note 2 users. You can’t travel around London today without noticing how many people are now using these Samsung devices and recent market research from Gartner says that Samsung has overtaken Apple in worldwide smartphone sales.

Fitbit’s embrace of Android contrasts with Nike’s surprising decision to pull the plug on its Android companion app. The Nike Fuelband will synchronise its data via an iPhone, but not via Android.

Widget distributes the Fitbit fitness trackers in the UK, a product I first saw two years ago at the DISTREE exhibition, and we are convinced that we have backed a winner.

Lifetime maps are now appearing on more and more TomTom models

According to the latest data from market researchers GfK, the number of TomTom navigation devices sold in 2012 were pretty similar year on year to those in 2011. This leveling off of sales follows several years in which the number of GPS devices has fallen severely year on year as the market which had bought new units a few years earlier reached saturation.

Interestingly, while more units are sold in December than at other times of the year, the bulge is less noticeable than before. It seems that people are buying new satnav units when their old ones need replacing, and that can happen at any time of year, not just Christmas.

This year TomTom is including lifetime maps in more and more of the units it sells. The Go Live 1005 and the Via 135 now include free map updates for the life of the product for both the UK and European variants. Start 60 and Start 25 models only have free map updates for UK models.

Adam St Private Members’ Club lies behind this door. Picture (c) Lee Jackson www.victorianlondon.org

Zagats describes Adam St Private Members’ Club as an “intimate” subterranean “gem” “hidden away” off The Strand. The problem with being hidden away is that it is difficult to find for people coming there the first time. I have had many meetings start late because my guests could not find it. So here, for those whom I have lost, are step by step instructions.

Adam St is a small turning off the south side of the Strand, between Charing Cross and the Savoy Hotel.

The easiest way to find Adam Street is to walk along the Strand, and look for a small turning between a Cafe Nero and a Leon on the south side, the side which slopes down the hill towards the river.

Adam St Private Members’ Club is a few doors down the street, on the same side as the Leon, just past the bike railings. .

There is only a very small brass sign for Adam St. You have to look the simple black door in the photo.

Just push the door open, you don’t need to buzz and follow the steps down to reception.

You don’t have to be a member of the club to go down to reception but a member is supposed to sign you in when you get there. There is no special dress code – gents do not have to wear ties.

Unlike the popular view of a private members’ club as a place for retired colonels to snooze before lunch, Adam St is used as a meeting point by freelancers, entrepreneurs, business developers who are trying to earn a living in London today.