Thursday 24 September 2009

Dixons: the last place you want to go...

I'm loving this new Dixons campaign, but I don't know i'm loving it in a healthy way. It's the sort of 'summarise the brand challenge' insight that turns into a whole strategy - sort of like Pot Noodle being the Slag of Snacks. I like buying tech toys as much as the next geek, on the few times I've had to go into Dixons I can safely say that it really is the last place you want to go for them. It doesn't feel properly dirty like Argos, so feels worse for pretending to have customer service but offering insultingly thick people who can't operate a camera trying hard sell features and benefits of cameras.

What it is doing though is getting people talking about Dixons, and evaluating their consideration list into 'research' (which Dixons would never have been on) and 'purchase' (which they may well stand a good chance of getting onto simply by gaining attention through humour and/or conversation). Selfridges and John Lewis make up the tension & the humour in this work, while the real target is Amazon, Pixmania, etc - everyone else on the 'purchase' side of the market.

So how is it working so far? It doesn't seem to be shifting huge volumes o
f searches, but Harrods are helping out with some free publicity by threatening to sue. And there's a love hate debate going on between people who see the ad - I tweeted about it when I first saw it, as did lots of other people. And the verdict is pretty positive so far - 66% positive on Twitter in London over the last few days
And the number of positive or negative (ie actually care) tweets currently outweighs the neutral ones - suggesting that if the strategy here is all about being talked about more than other cheap places amongst techie London Twitter type people, who might re-evaluate Dixons, then that positive sentiment is well deserved.

(you still wouldn't catch me in there though)

2 comments:

Rick Lamb said...

I think in the right circumstances this could be good, but the thing is they don't even stand up to comparison. My mate was buying Blu-Ray player and checked out the usual stores on TCR, Dixons (or Currys Digital or whatever it's called) and HMV, and it was cheapest in HMV and most expensive in Dixons. So by that measure it would be the last place you'd look, particularly when stores you wouldn't associate with hardware like HMV are better than them.

Le'Nise said...

Your point about not going to Dixons is probably echoed by a lot of people, which is why it's really interesting that they've used Dixons.co.uk on the ad, rather than just Dixons.

It shows an understanding that that more people are buying consumer electronics online and potentially nodding to the fact that most people will have a look on a price comparison site before they buy anything.

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