Use Us or Lose Us

Guest blogger, Vernon Hamblin of Unilet Sound & Vision and BADA board member asks us to ponder a few things...

Unilet Sound & Vision Ltd has survived for just over 42 years. It has survived, like thousands of other independent and privately owned shops and businesses the length and breadth of every High Street in this land, for two principal reasons:

First, it is a SPECIALIST retailer. It is staffed and owned by specialists. It is stocked with specialist equipment that those specialists know every inch of. They know how each bit of Hi-Fi and Home Cinema works. Why it does or doesn't work with other components. “Knowledge is Power” as someone once said. But fanaticism is something so much more powerful. Pick our brains......we are fanatics!

Second, Unilet survives because it wants to. We genuinely care that your Hi-Fi or Home Cinema looks and sounds as good as it possibly can for the budget you have set yourself. It prides itself on its levels of customer service. Its competitive prices. Its incomparable choice of product lines and unrivalled facilities.

But now Unilet Sound & Vision, like all independent specialist retailers, is at war. This war started quietly a few years ago......almost Guerilla like. Now that battle is full-on open warfare. Who are we in conflict with?
The answer may shock you......it's you.
Yes, YOU...the customer.

The customer who spends too much time on the internet. So much time, in fact, that it is neither good or healthy for you. Please stop believing that the 'Best price is the Best deal'...it isn't. You are doing yourself a disservice. Get out and get among us. We're nice people just trying to do a good job. Come and talk to us and look and listen. It's so much more interesting than the computer screen!

In the meantime, we'll keep on keeping on......”Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war” is a call to arms for us all. Do it not and the High Street we know and love simply won't exist!

www.unilet.net
www.bada.co.uk

Turn it Up

“I love it loud, I wanna hear it loud, right between the eyes, Loud, I wanna hear it loud.” And so the, oh so poetic, lyric from the KISS song goes on.

Driving down the elevated section of the M4 towards Heathrow last week, I noticed a poster for the new Mercedes AMG 480-something BHP monster. Making it look a bit like KITT, from that masterpiece of TV that was Knight RIder, this very imposing car is adorned with an array of LED lights on its bonnet. Closer inspection shows it’s actually an overlaid volume control indicator from a portable music player which is set on maximum. The strapline for the advert reads - “It’s Loud!”

And then there are the media reports on the ever increasing volume of today’s recordings and how certain CDs are mastered just so loud that even die hard fans are complaining. Who would have thought that Metallica fans would ever say their favourite band’s new album is too loud! That’s exactly what happened with the release of Death Magnetic from the world’s biggest heavy metal band. Even the mastering engineer, Ted Jensen, sided with the critics, saying, in response to an email from a fan "Believe me, I'm not proud to be associated with this one." The problem comes about as a result of the battle to win what in marketing parlance is called the share of voice. In a world of almost infinite, and largely throw away, media content, being loud tends to get you noticed; so artists and the record labels are pushing all the sliders to 11. The result is a greatly reduced dynamic range - the loud parts of the music are loud and the quiet parts of the music are also loud! The subtleties in the music are lost and the fine detail just disappears into the mush. With iTunes and the portable compressed music formats being by far the most popular way to listen to music, the record companies are tailoring their output to suit these formats. The low quality ear buds supplied with iPods are incapable of reproducing a broad dynamic range and so the music is mastered in such a way as to make it work on the reproduction equipment.

So it’s obvious that there is an obsession with “loud” sweeping the world. It seems like quality really doesn’t do it for the masses any more, which frankly is a crying shame as people just don’t know what they’re missing, which I’ll come back to in a moment.

In the meantime, this week has seen the big announcement from Apple that iTunes now offers The Beatles re-mastered albums for download. Whilst it’s great that such iconic music is made available to the young iPod users, via a format they understand and possibly the only format they ever consider, isn’t a shame that they’ll only experience it at compressed music quality? There’s a consensus amongst many audiophiles (hate that word, as it conjures up images of the weirdo with food in his beard!) that the recently released Beatles remasters on CD don’t actually sound as good as previous releases. And therein lies another myth of the marketing hype surrounding remasters of classic albums - remastering doesn’t necessarily mean better. So not only are they buying new versions of classic albums that arguably don’t sound as good as they could, but they’re buying them in a compressed format that will detract from the performance even more, but tragically they either don’t know or don’t care.

Coming back to what people are missing, and to coin a phrase, there are unknown unknowns here - there just isn’t the awareness of what constitutes good quality. It feels in some way as if the rug has been pulled from under our feet on the question of quality music reproduction. Hi-Fi has always been about quality, with the founders of our industry and their successors constantly trying to find better ways of reproducing music (and now movies). We were the guardians of good sound quality and that was understood by the public, but now there is a lack of concern for quality as quantity has overtaken it. There is an ‘am I bothered’ and ‘whatever’ attitude towards what we do and so it could be argued that our role is becoming increasingly redundant in a world ruled by the mp3.

But before I slip any further into a morose epitaph for our industry and earn my place on Grumpy Old Men, I will regain my sense of pride in what we do. We make fantastic products that make listening to music and watching movies an absolute joy. We owe it to ourselves and all the music lovers out there to shout about it and to keep chipping away at the public’s consciousness. Of course it is easier to do this as a collective than as individuals, which is where a trade association such as BADA comes into its own. Let us not forget our roots - there would be no CI without home cinema and no home cinema without hi-fi and hi-fi is all about quality. We are all members of one industry and if we work together under the auspices our trade association and in conjunction other complementary associations, we stand a better chance of changing people’s perceptions of what we do and how relevant we are to their lives. Let’s join the obsession with volume and turn our message up.

You're just a click away. Part 2

How to get started?

The key is to get organised in advance of starting anything. This is no different from any traditional marketing communications activity - it’s all in the planning. Let’s use the BADA experience as an example of how you could potentially plan a social media strategy.

It was decided that, as BADA’s communications efforts are done on behalf of its members, the overriding strategic objective was for the new BADA website to be designed as a portal through which consumers could easily reach their local retailer. To be successful at this, it was obvious that it would need to do well in Google searches and be a site that people thought of when contemplating hi-fi and home entertainment purchases.

The tactics were fairly simple:

1. to design the site to be naturally good with search engine searches (through careful consideration of the language used, numerous links, regular updates etc.)
2. to concentrate on maintaining the SEO (search engine optimisation) through the services of a specialist SEO company
3. to reach out to as many potential customers through Social Media with the aim of directing them to the website

We started by identifying who we wanted to communicate with. In a nutshell (and this will be the same for any business operating in our sector) we wanted to talk to existing hi-fi/ home cinema users, music lovers and movie enthusiasts. From this we determined which applications they were likely to use and which of those applications give the opportunity to segment and target by interests. In our case we came up with two lists. The primary one consisted of the main apps that we’ve all heard of: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Blogger and Flickr. It is these that we have implemented first and our secondary list, which includes things like gogoyoko (a music focused site) will be implemented later.

To start we setup a BADA Facebook fanpage and added some basic content to it, this was followed by a Linkedin company page and the creation of a Twitter account. Flickr was next and this was populated with a variety of photographs

One of our must-haves was to make the integration of our chosen applications as seamless as possible, to reduce the amount of time needed to keep them up to date by enabling them to talk to one another. The trouble is, they’re all written by different companies and getting them to interact isn’t as easy as it should be, as my experience with Flickr and Facebook demonstrated.

The BADA blog had already been running for a while and this was then joined by a Twitter account. What we did then was to start linking the accounts using 3rd party software. It is possible to use software such as Ping or Atomkeep, which enable you to enter information once and it is then automatically spread to all your other social networking applications. This is by far the easiest way in terms of management time, but it does limit your flexibility as everything you post will go everywhere. We opted not to go down this route, instead we set up individual links between some of our applications so we can have more control over what appears where. You may decide that the one stop shop option is best for your requirements.

The crucial thing is the targeting and how that is set up. There are numerous applications that let you specify the type of people your communiques are sent to. For example, we used something called Twollow, which automatically allows us to follow people on Twitter who are talking about specific subjects, and Twitter etiquette says they should follow us in return. As we have links between Twitter and the Blog and the website, it should drive traffic onto the BADA website and hence onto the members.

Social Media is a vast subject and one we can only scratch the surface of in this article. Hopefully we’ve whetted your appetite and you’re hungry to find out more. It can be a fantastically powerful communications tool, and talking to our customers and potential customers is possibly the most important thing we can do. In the meantime join us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Linkedin and read the BADA blog - all accessible from the new BADA website at www.bada.co.uk

You’re just a click away. Part 1

Unless you’ve been in hibernation for the past couple of years, you can’t fail to have noticed that something called Social Media is all over the news and on everyone’s lips at the moment. Along with websites, email, apps, mms, texts, good old fashioned phone calls and, shock horror, face to face conversations, it’s one of the seemingly endless number of ways we now have to communicate with our customers.

Before we go any further, take a minute to consider the six main benefits of Social Media:
It gets people talking about your brand. It gives very quick results. It can be easily targeted. It improves your search engine rankings. It works alongside your traditional marketing. It can cost nothing.

But how well are we coping with this plethora of communication methods? I know from working on the new BADA website that it can be very time consuming. BADA has embraced the world of Social Media, on top of the regular website updates, newsletters, news releases and magazine columns. It could easily be a full time job just keeping on top of all the communication tools at my disposal, never mind anything else. It’s taken me a day to get the link from our Flickr page to the Facebook fanpage to work properly, and that’s just the mechanics, never mind actually making use of them for communications.

It’s difficult to get an accurate figure for the number of social media sites, but it’s well in excess of 200 and there are literally thousands of apps that work with them. And here are a couple of really mind-blowing statistics: Facebook has 200 million active users and there have been, as I write this, 21 billion tweets on Twitter.

So you would be forgiven for thinking it must be nigh on impossible to actually reach the people you want to talk to. It’s overwhelming; how do you sort out which applications to use, how to target effectively and what sort of time to allocate to maintaining them?

Next time in part 2, how to get started.

BADA's new website - designed to help you find you nearest specialist retailer

The British Audio-Visual Dealers Association, the specialist hi-fi and home cinema industry’s leading trade association, has today launched its new website, which is designed to help consumers find their nearest specialist retailer and give advice on buying quality home entertainment products.

Just two clicks of the mouse, via an interactive map of the UK, and the enquirer is taken to a map of their area, with rollovers showing the details of the closest store. From there they can view the store’s own website, send an email, call them or get directions.

The interactive map locator has been installed on every page of the new site, so the visitor is never more than two clicks away from their local BADA member.

“Want to know why you should visit a BADA retailer?” Here you see an explanation of the benefits of shopping at one of the network of BADA members, with information about their commitment to customer service, comparative demonstration facilities, impartial advice, and most importantly, their membership of the UK’s only national network of retailers trained to agreed industry standards.

BADA's new website, designed to help consumers

The British Audio-Visual Dealers Association, the specialist hi-fi and home cinema industry’s leading trade association, has today launched its new website, which is designed to help consumers find their nearest specialist retailer and give advice on buying quality home entertainment products.

Just two clicks of the mouse, via an interactive map of the UK, and the enquirer is taken to a map of their area, with rollovers showing the details of the closest store. From there they can view the store’s own website, send an email, call them or get directions.

“Want to know why you should visit a BADA retailer?” In this section you will see an explanation of the benefits of shopping at one of the network of BADA members. With information about their commitment to customer service, comparative demonstration facilities, impartial advice, and most importantly, their membership of the UK’s only national network of retailers trained to agreed industry standards.

Check it out at www.bada.co.uk

Will the digital revolution kill music?

There was a time when music was a thing to be cherished, now it could be argued that is just a commodity which is unvalued and throw-away.

It would be churlish for me to say the music of yesteryear was better quality and the charts now are full of talentless pseudo-celebs. But, regardless of my personal prejudices, there is certainly something fundamentally different about what’s being bought now compared to 20 or 30 years ago. It may not necessarily be the quality of the musicianship or composition, but simply just the quality and all that that word encompasses.

Everything develops and music is no exception, but is there perhaps a fundamental shift in the importance of music in our lives? It is true that there are many more people listening to music than ever before, but how critically are they listening? Do they even hear what they’re listening to and what are the implications for the hi-fi industry?

Hi-Fi is a luxury product and with such a purchase goes a degree of pride of ownership. I would like to think that most people who buy hi-fi equipment do so because they appreciate the benefits it gives to them in terms of enjoyment of the music. The owner is justifiably proud of the new equipment and is probably just as proud of the music played on it. When music was purchased on vinyl, cassette or CD there was a tangible element to the purchase. Both the music and the carrier medium were inseparable items to treasure, it was as if one couldn’t exist without the other. The human interface with a music collection was rather similar to the action of taking an old book off a shelf or a bottle of wine from a rack, blowing the dust off and settling down to enjoy it.

There are some startling statistics on downloads, which really do give food for thought and I’ll leave you with these whilst you ponder on whether the digital revolution will be responsible for the death of quality music and hi-fi or the opportunity to reach out to a new market.

From the British Music Rights survey:
84% of 18-24 year olds own an mp3 player
63% of those questioned illegally download music
80% thought music was the most important thing they bought in a given month
Of those still buying CDs, only 7% buy them for the sound quality