NPD Marks 25 Years In Tracking CE Business

By Stephen Baker -- TWICE, 8/8/2011

In people terms, a 25-year-old is a mere bird of youth dreaming about what the future will hold. Surviving 25 years in business makes you a grizzled veteran. With that in mind, it is worth celebrating the 25th anniversary of TWICE’s coverage of the consumer electronics business.

The CE industry reinvents itself every five or 10 years, and that is many lifetimes of change and reinvention. After 25 years, today’s electronics world bears little resemblance to what the CE markets stood for in that long-ago age.

It’s not just products that have changed over that time, but also the people, the retailers and the institutions as well. To survive and prosper for 25 years is quite an accomplishment in that environment, a feat we at The NPD Group know well, because we just happen to be celebrating our 25th year of tracking the CE business as well.

In that long ago time, the electronics business was a sleepy backwater consumer business, but 1986 was right on the cusp of a time of great change for the CE industry.

Speakers, receivers, turntables and car audio were the main products sold in CE stores back then, but storm clouds were brewing. Video was in its infancy, and the VCR was in the midst of transforming the movie and content industries into something to be enjoyed outside the confines of the movie theater.

The Sony Walkman and the music CD were taking hold of the public’s consciousness. Most of the distribution for these products at the time was through enthusiast and specialty stores, while products like TVs were primarily sold by the department stores and discounters of the day. The arrival of consumer PCs on retail shelves had just barely begun, and the retailers were mostly dealers focused on business sales. Few CE chains, as we know them today, existed — although most of our favorites (both those still here and those long gone) were beginning to find their footing in a business that was on the cusp of one of its first product explosions.

Fast-moving businesses need chroniclers and trackers. NPD and TWICE have served that purpose, ably I think, throughout all the changes that have transformed the industry over the past 25 years. TWICE has outlasted Computer Retail Week, HFD’s CE section, and many other fine publications.

At The NPD Group the pace of change has been swift as well: Today’s NPD stands as the product of acquisitions of such companies as Computer Intelligence, PC Data and Audits and Surveys. Both TWICE and NPD have survived by being nimble, thorough, and accurate — providing context, insight and direction in the wake of the seminal changes that periodically rock our industry.

So how do I know all this? Well actually, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it is my 25th anniversary in the CE industry, too — although my career started a bit tangentially at Staples, which, not coincidentally, was also founded 25 years ago (as was Office Depot).

At the time our CE products basically consisted of calculators and business phones, voice recorders and transcribers, the mundane office technology of the time — technology that seems incredibly dated today.

And without the PC to sell, our primary business technology tool was the personal copier. No one who worked at Staples in those days can forget the stacks of Canon PC-24 and PC-25 copiers flying off the shelves, and the accompanying toner volumes that set the stage for the office stores position as the consumables powerhouse they have become.

I am proud to help celebrate TWICE’s 25th anniversary, just as I am proud of The NPD Group’s 25 years of tracking the CE business, and my own participation in the birth of a retail industry. The CE business is very different today — no longer a sleepy backwater in the retail landscape, no longer a marginal intrusion into the consumer’s consciousness.

Today the CE industry, and the retailers and manufacturers that support it, are household names supplying the vital devices and services that consumers depend on to make their modern lives go.

And while neither TWICE nor NPD is a household name (nor, sadly am I), we should be justifiably proud of our role in bringing clarity, insight and information to the industry, helping it grow and prosper and become the $150 billion behemoth that excites us all to get up every day to see what new inventions we have created.

Stephen Baker is industry analysis VP of the NPD Group.