A Forum Of Predictions, New Ideas

The CEA Industry Forum, which is held every mid-October, is the last chance each year for top industry leaders to get together and compare notes to see how sales in the onrushing holiday season will fare. It's usually a mix of hard facts and food for thought. This year's event was no exception.

Usually the lead story of the forum is CEA's Annual Holiday Purchase Patterns survey, and that was certainly the case this year. Sean Wargo, CEA's industry analysis director, presented the 10th annual study, and said that while consumer confidence is slowly gaining, and the public loves CE products more than ever, revenue for the season will be down. The numbers look like this, according to CEA: unit sales will be up 4 percent, but average pricing will be down 5 percent, so total revenue will be down 2 percent.

Given the survey's strong track record over the years, and indications of current trends, most of the manufacturers and retailers I spoke to at the conference said, off the record, that they agreed with the survey. False bravado or not, these same execs added that their operations would have slightly higher revenue.

One of my favorite panels at the forum was one about HDTV and consumer confusion — something that we've heard about ad nauseum for the past couple of years at least. The good news, again from a CEA survey, is that while there is work to be done to educate consumers about HDTV, they seem to realize that their next big-screen TV will be an HDTV and that the new digital sets deliver better video and audio than ever before. The bad news is that retailers are still complaining that manufacturers aren't doing enough to alleviate confusion by consumers and retail salespeople.

Of course in consumer electronics, as in life in general, there are always chronic, negative complainers who never solve a problem. They just whine. But there are other people who see a problem and try to find a solution. Those people are winners. The winner in this little parable is Bjorn Dybdahl, president of Bjorn's Audio/Video of San Antonio.

Dybdahl's one-store operation has had a reputation for innovation over the years. Dybdahl saw the confusion problem with HDTV, and other digital CE products, and didn't wait for someone to solve his problem. He began to produce his own radio and then TV ads to educate consumers about HDTV and digital CE in general.

Dybdahl screened some of the commercials in his talk at the forum. He was nice enough to give me a DVD of all his commercials to screen. In my humble opinion they are the best, and the most informative generic presentations on HDTV I have ever seen.

He's probably going to kill me for suggesting this if he gets inundated with calls, but I only wish he had the wherewithal to provide copies of that DVD to independent and regional CE chains nationwide. I think Dybdahl's commercials are great educational vehicles, for consumers and retail salespeople, and might spark some ideas by other retailers to come up with their own innovative advertising/training ideas.

(For full coverage of the report see p. 1 and for more on the statistical reports released by CEA at the conference, watch for TWICE's State of the Industry issue on Nov. 24.)