2007 May 31

Why you should NOT buy Target’s TruTech brand

Here’s a rant/report on an experience I had with Target Stores that might prove helpful as you think about your interactions with customers, how you support them and what it does for a brand — and a huge caution if you ever considering buying Target’s consumer electronics brand, TruTech.

Before I get started some disclosure is necessary: my wife was once the audio buyer for Target and I was a manufacturer’s representative calling on her with Pioneer Electronics (no…I didn’t ask her out while she was a buyer but waited until she was promoted out of the area into a non-conflict of interest position…but I digress). So we both know this game well and I can only imagine what Joe SixPack thinks since alot of “Joe’s” seem to be having similar experiences.

In November of 2006, I purchased a Target brand TV/DVD combo for my first year college daughter (this Target “TruTech” model). It was cheap but more than sufficient for her needs. When plugging the batteries into the remote I remarked on how cheap it was and — having broken and lost many remotes in my day — was not terribly concerned since universal remotes are so easy to find and cheap to buy…

…unless you’re a major mass merchandiser that buys from multiple vendors that do not offer or publish their remote control codes and have one place to buy a replacement for nearly 17% of the retail price of the unit itself!

(Please note the updates at the bottom of the next page)

Early this morning I watched the video of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at AllThingsD conference. So many people have written about this event — and many were hoping it would be a cage match between Bill and Steve — that I’m going to add a perspective and place this event into a different context.

In January of 2005, I reminisced a bit about being in Hawaii in November of 1983 when Steve intro’ed the Macintosh to the company (I was with Apple’s manufacturer’s representative group in Minnesota at the time).

When I work on technology innovation with senior strategists in organizations through strategy and ideation work, it’s important to appreciate the revolutionary and evolutionary aspects of human creation without solely focusing on the past. But having a perspective on what it was like and where we are now can inform where we’re headed and help set expectations on how fast the future we invent will be adopted.

Listening to these guys talk about 128kb’s of memory in the first Macintosh with an operating system taking ~20kb’s of RAM is hilarious to me as I sit in front of a laptop with 3GB’s of memory that can run Mac, Windows and Linux OS’es; an 120GB hard drive (floppies at the time held 400kb which is less than half of one jpeg image from my digital camera!); and recipes were the killer app for personal computers while I now can do press layout and video editing while casually looking up almost any piece of data I need instantly with bits flying through the air to my wireless card. Add to that webcams, digital video and still cameras, software for blogging, social connections and even virtual spaces, searchable worldwide information and knowledge sets (e.g., Wikipedia) being delivered and the changes are incredible…and accelerating.

But there is SO MUCH change underway that the less than 30 years worth of changes in personal computing Steve and Bill have experienced will happen in years instead of decades and we’re already in a time of change that is thrilling and scary as hell at the same time.

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