I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of brands becoming so big, so successful, and so engrained in their industry that the branding becomes synonymous with what it is, regardless of who made it. The often-cited classic examples are Hoover and Jacuzzi, of course. Both registered trademarks and successful companies in their own right, but both now firmly in the common lexicon as generic terms for vacuums and hot tubs, respectively. This is obviously the result of years of successful marketing and operations, but I can’t help but feel it must be a tad frustrating when something goes wrong, and your brand gets lumped in with the pretenders purely by virtue of being a victim of your own success.
We have seen this happen in the interactive screen business over the past decade or so, with long-time players and innovators – SMART taking the brunt this time. Nearly every organisation we go to tells us they ‘have had smart screens for years’ or that ‘the current smart screens are old and out of warrantee’. Only for us to arrive and find they have anything and everything but SMART screens, a plethora of weird and wonderful hardware from the four corners of the globe and with varying degrees of actual functionality, which wouldn’t look out of place in a science museum.
The legacy of SMART is everywhere in schools, with teachers clinging on to their version 11 SMART learning software like an old comfort blanket, but the rise of the budget screen has been monumental over the past few years as business managers look to tick the ‘interactive classroom’ box at minimum cost.
A wiser man than me once said ‘buy cheap, buy twice’. This is definitely a good adage when it comes to buying socks – but does it apply to interactive screens when, on the face of it, there are so few real differentials between them these days?
’20-point touch, 4K screen, 5-year no quibble warrantee – what more do I need?’
What more indeed. How much credence do you take from knowing your screens are from well-established, industry leaders who are unlikely to go bust any time soon? Or from knowing they have spent decades ploughing money into research and development to hone their product offering?
Provenance is as important an element in consumerism as price-point. Manufacturers of quality products should stand by their ‘premiumness’ and own it with pride. In danger of getting lost in the melee of ever decreasing price-points, they need to avoid becoming just another ‘smart screen’ and talk more openly about why they are more expensive in the first place, and the additional value their features offer. It is a drum which needs banging loudly, to be heard over the rowdy price-point pushers dragging each other down in an inevitable footrace straight to the bottom.
It remains to be seen how this race to provide the cheapest interactive screen will play out, or where it will end. The most interesting bit for us will be seeing who exactly decides to join in and at what cost to others.
Our mantra has always been ‘less is more’ with respect to stocking brands. We are, admittedly, a little picky. We firmly believe there is more to procurement than shaving a few quid off the P&L and find that our partners are appreciative of that. A screen needs to be the right fit for the final user and other stakeholders, not just for the guardian of the purse strings, because let’s face it – if it’s the wrong fit they’ll be banging down the doors asking for something that is the right fit fairly quickly. Then, the ‘buy cheap buy twice’ adage will have a whole new layer of meaning.
