RetailVision: Collaboration Will See Us Through Bad Times

In a complex, hypercompetitive retail environment with disappearing profits and less loyal consumers, better collaboration between retailers and vendors will help both sides prosper. That was the word from a Wednesday town hall panel at RetailVision, hosted by Everything Channel Editorial Director and Senior Vice President Robert DeMarzo.

"In my experience, collaboration does not happen as often as it should. Usually the interaction is at the commercial level, and instead of actually looking at the forest you're just looking at the trees," said Ernesto Aguilar, vice president of LaserJet Printers at Hewlett-Packard. "There's no holistic view. But you can't think like that."

"My term for it is 'win-win situation,'" said Jason Wu, CEO of Tekserve. "You have to pick your vendor and tell the vendor what you want to achieve, and set up the standards and expectations from both sides."

Bob Gregerson, vice president for North American Retail and Channel Sales at Cisco Systems' Consumer Business, suggested that with the new degree of complexity in both retail products themselves and what consumers want to be able to do with them, vendors depend on strategic partnerships more than ever.

"This is a big parallel to what happened many years ago in the VAR community," Gregerson said. "What we do know is that we can't keep selling the same way. I can't have a router in the network aisle and leave it at that. We have to team together and figure out how to hit this solution messaging to the customer, whether it's wireless printing, storage, gaming, online, anything."

For a business like 7-Eleven, whose focus is not specifically electronics, the need to be flexible is especially crucial, argued 7-Eleven Category Manager Michael Jester.

"We are not a traditional channel in any sense of the word," Jester said. "The need we're filling is that customers need technology to become a part of their life. We're built primarily around accessories. There's no reason for a tech vendor to want to do business with a convenience store unless they get something out of it. There has to be a win on both sides."

Green products have proven recession-resistant, said Scott Beckmann, Director of North American Consumer Business at APC, but customers must be shown, exactly, how they can save money.

For Jester, headphones, video games and DVD movies have stayed strong. For Wu, external hard drives are big business and will stay that way because their prices have dropped so much. Aguilar suggested multifunction printers would stay hot because many single-function printer consumers could readily see the need to switch and have all of their printer, fax and scan functions on one unit.

The overarching theme among all of the resilient products, vendors and retailers was demonstrable value targeted to customer needs.

All of the panelists expressed disappointment at the demise of Circuit City earlier this year. "It's a big pill to swallow," Gregerson said. However, no one denied the opportunities a Circuit City-less retail landscape provides for other electronics retailers, especially regional players who don't compete at the big-box level.

"Once you don't have a player, of course there are new opportunities," Aguilar said.

"We didn't pick up their customers necessarily," said Tracy Roloff, divisional merchandise manager at Pamida, a mass-market retailer based in Nebraska, primarily serving rural communities. "But from a vendor standpoint, there's a huge uptick. All these vendors have to fill a void. I'm telling you, I've never fielded more questions in my life than at the moment, and it's from tier-one people, too, like Apple."

RetailVision, taking place April 27-30 in Boca Raton, Fla., is owned by Everything Channel, the parent company of Channelweb.com.

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