As the early returns come in on the holiday shopping weekend results from various sources, including NPD’s Anatomy of Black Friday consumer survey, a few things are becoming clear. While brick-and-mortar stores likely had a tough time on Black Friday, as we estimate electronics sales up only minimally overall, online sales truly came into their own this year. For those of us in the consumer technology business that is no surprise, sales have been growing rapidly online for a few years. But a funny thing happened on the way to this sales growth. What clearly propelled this year’s growth was the online marketplace’s embrace of traditional retail marketing tactics.
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Having just returned from my annual Black Friday morning shopping trip I am struggling to suppress a yawn. Not just because I got up at 2:45AM, but because I have to confess, once again, that I just didn’t see anything as I shopped today that either changes my general outlook on the holiday for tech or provides a window into how aggressively consumers may be shopping for electronics. As I said last year, giving away highly-desirable products in limited quantities for outrageously low prices is always going to draw a crowd. However, at some point you begin to bump into the realities of installed bases, low prices, and relevancy. This year’s struggle to determine what the most relevant, most exciting products to sell was especially acute and I believe will lead to lackluster results, similar to what we’ve seen all year.
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In a typically bad reference to very good Shakespeare NPD’s recently completed Wireless Printing Survey (and HP’s Innovation event a couple of months ago in NYC) force us to ask that age old question.
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The 2010 consumer technology holiday outlook looks increasingly dark as we approach the end of October and the real kick-off of the holiday selling season. In today’s TWICE Webinar we detailed some of our reasoning behind NPD’s pessimistic outlook.
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NPD has released the second in its series of iPad surveys. While the first looked at buying intentions prior to the launch this one is more focused on what the current ownership looks like and how those owners are using their iPad. In conjunction with the press release we thought we would add some color around the iPad experience, bypassing some of the more contentious product based discussions out there. The survey provided some in-depth information on all aspects of the iPad, but today we are going to look at two distinct areas. First, is what owners like and dislike about their iPads, and second is how consumers are using their iPad.
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The last few weeks have been filled with reports that U.S. consumer PC sales are collapsing and that the iPad is to blame. Now that NPD has released August numbers we can take a look at the real story and the clear result is that trying to understand what is happening without the real numbers that NPD provides is folly. There is very little hard evidence that the iPad is killing notebooks sales and to say so represents the height of hysteria and speculation.
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NPD’s 2010 Security Software Topical uncovered some interesting trends this year, some of which we released in a press release today, but some of the other tidbits require a little more nuanced reading into the last 3 years of data.
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Microsoft released the consumer version of Office 2010 to retail a few weeks ago, and according to NPD’s Weekly Tracking Service the results are mixed. Units and dollars are down from Office 2007’s initial two weeks of sales but are in line, and in fact slightly ahead of, sales trends of Office 2007 so far this year. This fact highlights the challenges for Microsoft going forward for Office. A strong product launched into a saturated market faces considerable headwinds. Even so, sales of Office 2010 in general have to be characterized as a bit disappointing during the first two weeks.
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Those of us in retail and consumer marketing are often confronted with this truism. And while consumers are the ones plunking down their hard earned money on the latest (or cheapest) tech gadget, we in the business often think we know what the consumer wants better than the consumer does. Sometimes we are right, and then sometimes we are wrong. And the best companies move to take advantage of that customer feedback and can accept that sometimes their initial marketing or sales tactics missed the mark.
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A couple of months ago we talked about some distribution and reseller sales statistics which indicated that, at least as we exited 2009 sales growth had begun to pickup in the SMB focused channels that NPD tracks besides retail. As we are now through the first few months of 2010 we have seen this trend continue, in both our Distributor Track and our Commercial Reseller Tracking services. In both, revenue is tracking towards 2008 levels and showing substantial revenue growth over the depressed levels of 2009.
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Consumer Technology | Stephen Baker, Vice President, Industry Analysis | 
November 29, 2010 12:35 pm | 
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