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Exhibitor - 2007—JVC Co. of America
The 12-Minute Brain Dump
An average electronics store may carry as many as 10,000 products. If a salesperson received a scant five minutes of training on each product, he would need slightly more than 104 eight-hour workdays to learn every gizmo in the store—and that’s assuming nothing new ever came in the door.
Consumer-electronics manufacturer JVC Co. of America knew that if it wanted sale associates in electronics stores to evangelize for its new high-definition HD-ILA TV and Everio G hard-disk Camcorder, it needed a training strategy that would cut through the rest of its retailers’ products.
The Wayne, NJ,-based division of Japan’s Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., had traditionally trained store personnel off site at local hotels. Now there was a glitch. With the retail environment speeding up like a DVD player stuck on fast forward, “fewer and fewer store managers allow their staff to leave for training,” says Karl Bearnarth, a vice president of marketing for JVC. “But ultimately our ROI revolves around educating those sales associates, because as they go, so go our products. We had to come up with something new.”
JVC connected with ZAG Marketing Inc., a specialist in mobile marketing headquartered in Gillette, NJ. “We wanted a rolling college that came right to their door,” Bearnarth says.
JVC took a mostly bottom-up approach for its tour. First, it asked dealers to opt-in to the program. Then, JVC product specialists met with ZAG for several hours over several weeks to educate them on the products and bookmark the key selling points the experts had gleaned from training those dealers and working sales conferences and trade shows. ZAG edited the hours of material down to a user-friendly 12 minutes per presentation, but could even pare the materials down to near elevator-speech brevity if the situation warranted it.
JVC’s three-month road show, dubbed “The Perfect Experience Tour 2005,” started in July of 2005 and ended in September. JVC keyed in on 250 stops in the East and West, with one bus for each coast. A support truck accompanied each bus with equipment for a consumer pavilion, which set up next to the bus at each stop.
On weekdays, the 45-foot-long bus (like the kind that carts rock stars around) arrived in the retailers’ parking lots around 10 a.m. for its first training of the day, stayed about 60 to 90 minutes, then headed to the next store location. The buses could go as late as 8 p.m. during the week, depending on store traffic. On weekends the hours expanded, opening at 9 a.m. for the training sessions before setting up at approximately 11 a.m. outside the trailer for the consumer experience. The team would then close the consumer experience around 6 p.m. The scheduling differences took into account the crowd flow at different times of the week, maximizing the number of consumers touched by the campaign.
Store personnel entered the bus and sponged up the two 12-minute educational presentations in two areas outfitted with couches and plasma monitors running product demos. Because the company realized that each store would be slightly different in some way, JVC and ZAG trained its staff to think on their feet and change the presentation by elaborating on some parts while shortening others to fit the sales associates’ needs.
Once the two five-member teams of ZAG staffers finished the presentation, the retailers’ sales associates, now implanted with the JVC meme , went to work in the 20-by-40-foot pavilion JVC set up outside. There, in a bright red loft-like environment, they imparted their new information to consumers and demonstrated the equipment in the Everio Camcorder Studio and the HD-ILA Home Theater Room. For example, they could now knowledgeably show consumers how to both capture footage and then edit it on the Everio G camcorder.
While its goals for consumers were soft ones—essentially they wanted to get the word out about the HD-ILA TV and the camcorder—JVC had harder ones for its main targets. The company hoped to train at least 2,000 sales associates during the tour. The tour finished in Orlando at a sales training conference for Best Buy personnel where JVC snagged 1,200 sales associates in one shot, which meant that by tour’s end it had trained almost 3,000—nearly 50 percent more than its goal. By and measure, that’s a Perfect Experience.
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