I’d been planning to write this post before the announcement yesterday that the CEO of Best Buy is resigning. Maybe it’s a bit more topical today.
trying to end discounts on consumer electronics
Early in the month, Korean and Japanese consumer electronics firms–among them, Samsung, LG, Sony and Panasonic–announced new rules for sales of their high-end products in the US.
Previously, the device manufacturers had at least threatened to, and perhaps actually withheld sales incentive payments to retailers who aggressively discounted the recommended selling prices set by the brands. That didn’t stop internet retailers from undercutting their bricks-and-mortar rivals, however. The manufacturers are now taking a new tack.
From April 1st, the consumer electronics companies say they won’t just not pay marketing money to discounters. They won’t ship “hot” products to them at all. To get the latest and greatest, buyers will have to go to full-price outlets.
Sounds crazy.
Why would they do this?
Two reasons occur to me:
1. The manufacturers want to preserve the bricks-and-mortar distribution channel. In particular, they want to preserve the big-box strip mall retailers like Best Buy.
This would be somewhat like what the book publishers did a year ago, when they forced Amazon–by withholding newly-published “best seller” e-books from the internet retailer–to charge higher prices. That provided a pricing umbrella under which independent bookstores could a least continue to limp along and under which Barnes and Noble could complete development of its own e-reader, the Nook.
2. As far as I’m aware, the consumer electronics companies aren’t going to raise wholesale prices. So they won’t initially make more money. They may think, however, that if all retailers become more profitable, then they’ll be less likely to resist future increases in wholesale quotes–or future reductions in sales incentives.
the new plan won’t work
My guess is that this new plan will do more harm than good. Four reasons:
1. When prices go up, consumers buy less. If the price of, say, high-end HDTVs rises by the $800 a unit that some are suggesting, sales volumes will doubtless contract. Pre-Great Recession, a customer might think of a new HDTV as being like a new car–and finance it. Not today. Absent easy availability of cheap credit–and customer willingness to use it–the falloff in unit volume that higher prices brings might be surprisingly large. And not every manufacturer is in rude financial health, so profit contraction could be painful.
2. There’s no reason to think that loss in unit volume will be distributed equally across all competitors. In an environment of smaller price differentials, competition won’t disappear. It will just take a new form. My candidate is perceived product quality. If so, I think this means the market will gravitate toward Samsung and away from Sony. In any event, market share losers would be under enormous pressure to go back to the old system, before the new competitive game causes irreparable damage to their businesses.
3. The umbrella of higher prices will potentially allow competitors who don’t adopt the new system–or new market entrants, for that matter–to compete successfully by discounting aggressively.
4. The move won’t fix what ails Best Buy, in my opinion.
Thirty years ago, suburban big box retailers were an evolutionary advance over urban department stores and local mom and pop shops. They still are, but the latter, like the dodo, aren’t the competition anymore (actually, the dodo never were).
Today’s competition takes two forms:
–internet retailers, and
–Wal-Mart/Target/Costco, the discount retailers who are the modern successors to the department store.
Compared with the latter group, Best Buy stores are too big and too seasonal (think: Toys R Us). Best Buy has to lease, light, heat/cool and staff its retail space for the full twelve months of the year, even though 60% of its profits come from sales that happen between the year-end holidays and the Super Bowl. The others just expand and contract their seasonal departments, depending on the time of year.
Tilting the playing field away from internet retailers and to the benefit of bricks-and-mortar will, it seems to me, just intensify the battle between Best Buy and Wal-Mart et al. I think we all know who’s going to win that struggle.
there is a better solution for consumer electronics
By the way, this all shows how prescient Apple was in opening its Apple Stores.