If there was a theme to what I found during this session of the roundtable, it was “whatever works,” and what works is a little of the old, a little of the new, lots of tried and true and not a great deal of hardware.
It’s no surprise that prints, printing services, accessories and classes are high on the list of what dealers will be promoting this season. Cameras? With little if any profit to be made, many dealers are content to simply let the manufacturers take care of promoting them via TV commercials, newspaper inserts and magazine ads.
Let’s get to the details . . .
Stan Grosz
Horn Photo, Fresno, California
Traditionally, radio has always been consistent for us for promotions, and TV also; we’ve had good luck with both. [Though] print media doesn’t work for us anymore, we do get some sales from both the Canon and Nikon circulars . . . [and] we’re definitely on track with them for this holiday season. For us, a lot of it for Christmas is Christmas cards, and we’ll hit it hard up until Thanksgiving. The Monday after Thanksgiving we really don’t have to do a lot of advertising from that point on; the business just comes because prior to Thanksgiving we plant the seed of photo, so when you’re hustling and trying to solve your Christmas problems, you have us in mind. I know that’s a little unconventional, but we’re pretty much at our max in December. At times I’ve stopped advertising because we just couldn’t handle it.
Nice. So what you said about Christmas shopping problems—that’s the message in your advertising—whatever the customer needs, you can provide?
That might be more of the message in our social media advertising, like our YouTube videos. But now more than ever, our store has become so much of a problem solver. My people are [constantly] on the phones, and in person, solving problems, answering people’s questions—everything from where they can get a camera battery for a Panasonic whatever to a sync cord or a charger. Or they have old photographs that need restoring, or they found a bunch of their grandmother’s old negatives. Or they just need a 16×20 print. It goes on and on, all day, every day. In the Valley and in the Fresno metropolitan area, we have become the people everyone calls.
Mike Wilbur
Mike Crivello’s Cameras, Brookfield, Wisconsin
We stick with a lot of the tried and true. We do quite a bit of radio advertising. We have a jingle we’ve used for 40 years that has a lot of familiarity in the area, so customers come in singing the jingle. At the holidays we always try to give this kind of top-of-mind awareness, even if it isn’t for a specific product, though we may feature specific products based on rebates Canon or Nikon or one of the other vendors is offering. Generally we do a holiday sale that runs pretty much from Thanksgiving week through Christmas, and that’s promoted pretty heavily on radio with our jingle and a message along with it.
Sales on hardware . . . ?
There are not a lot of sale possibilities on hard goods, but we promote rebates and we do have sales on the accessory side—bags, tripods, things like that, the add-ons.
Any promotions on prints or calendars or photo books?
We do a lot of large-format printing, and we usually run a promotion. Last year we had a promotion through one of the radio stations for 16×20 prints; it did pretty well. We also do in-house canvas prints and other things along that line, so usually we’ll have some type of a print promotion we’ll send out with an e-mail blast and have it on our website. We used to be a larger chain with full finishing capability in each one of our stores, [but] through time we’ve reduced that, so we need to do something to get the idea out that we do these large prints.
Promotions along the lines of . . . ?
At Christmas, for gift giving, why not grab what you’ve got and turn it into something? There’s also a younger generation that’s not necessarily familiar with our stores because they don’t get prints. They didn’t have cameras at 10 years old, and now that they’re 20-something they’re using digital. So some of the radio stations we use are targeted to an 18–25 demographic.
You’re letting them know they can get prints made, and it’s a good gift idea.
Right, and then we’ll usually feature something on our photofinishing up front at our website, some type of a processing special.
So the idea of prints for the holidays has been successful for you?
It’s gotten people into the stores who may not have come in. Honestly, the big-box stores advertise the hard goods at the same price I’m at, and people can buy their camera, a computer accessory and whatever else at that one place, and they’re not necessarily thinking of me. So we have to plant something in their heads to get them to think about the camera store.
Any sort of promo of prints after the holidays?
We usually give away a gift card for 25 prints, so they come back to redeem them. We give them six months because it gets a little snowy and cold and not so great for picture taking in Wisconsin right after the holidays.
Do you expect decent sales of DSLRs this season?
DSLR sales are good, and I think that’ll continue for the holidays. To sell the DSLRs we’ll spend a half hour with a customer to make sure they know what’s going on with the camera they purchase, and they’ll know they can come back when they give it as a gift and get some help. But for some people that’s not an advantage. You see them holding their cell phones and you know they’re punching up the products they’re looking at and checking the prices online.
Fred Silvers
Bel Air Camera, Los Angeles, California
What’s happened, and not only for the Christmas period, is we’ve become more class oriented. We work with sites like Facebook and Twitter, and we offer one or two classes every weekend to get people into the shop. We’ve been in business since ’57, but there’s a whole generation of people out there who less and less come to camera shops. Everything’s on the Internet; they don’t see our ads. So I’ve got to go into social sites. We’re getting people that way, and many of them have never been to a shop before. They come in and it’s “Whoa, wow, hey,” and we’ve just created a relationship; then we go from there.
What do you say at the social sites that gets them in?
We do our best to find groups, the dot-com groups, and we relate photography to them. Could be cooking, dating, and we tell them we do the [print] processing, and we talk about teaching; could be product teaching or photography itself, like learning basic digital photography or learning portraits, studio lighting, eBay photography—anything to get the person started using the camera as a hobby. We have classes in the store, and I sell online digital classes, four to six minutes each, not a laborious process; you enjoy watching and it’ll teach you everything about digital photography. People can do it at their leisure, and it’s an affordable price so they can make the impulse buy. For $19.95 they can take the classes online for one year.
Do you work in a message along the lines of, now that you’ve learned, come in and get some gear?
We don’t take that approach. What we’re trying to do is get a person to realize we sell photography, and here’s what you can do to enjoy it. If they think it’s cool, they’re going to come and ask additional questions. And it works.
Art Esquibel
Camera & Darkroom, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Most of our advertising is for accessories. We talk about having the biggest selection of bags and we can fill every lighting need—we’ve got strobes, continuous lighting and softboxes. The shift from my standpoint is to talk to people about accessories.
How do you promote them?
Way out here in the hinterlands in Albuquerque there are two camera stores, so my advertising is virtually never geared to people who are heavily into photography, because anybody who is into photography in Albuquerque already knows us. I’m constantly trying to go after those folks whose need is either brand new or a one-time thing, or someone who needs a camera store twice a year. We have some newspaper advertising in the Albuquerque Journal, and we have flyers we distribute, but we like the kind of artsy papers from the smaller towns. A little paper that talks about the farmer’s market and other things going on locally will have a lot of circulation among people we’re interested in reaching. Those local papers tend to work very well.
Any promotion for printing services for the holidays?
We do that, and scanning services, and processing of film. A gentleman came in the other day with four rolls of film, and I found out that if he had it processed at Walmart they would keep the film. They don’t return it; they throw it away and give you a CD. But I haven’t tied film processing or printing services into the holidays.
Have you ever used any of the newspaper inserts offered by Canon and Nikon?
We did those, but we skipped last year, and I don’t think we’ll do it this year. It’s getting hard to stock that much hardware. Nikon and Canon naturally want the flyer to have every one of their cameras in it, but there were always people who were disappointed we didn’t have every item. There was never a point where I had one of everything. How much money would it take for me to actually stock everything in those flyers? They just set you up to make a lot of people unhappy.
Brian Henderson
Camera Wholesalers, Stamford, Connecticut
I don’t currently have [this year’s] plans in front of me, but what’s worked in the past is a tent sale we normally have in mid- to late October. We have all the reps come and demo their wares, and during November we usually have individual Saturdays for specific manufacturers—a Nikon day, a Canon day. And we’ll probably again be doing the newspaper inserts with Nikon, Canon and probably Sony. I don’t think we’ll be changing the [overall] formula this year.
And all that stimulated business for you?
Absolutely. And here in a photokina year, there could be lots of new wares to show.
Lots of new DSLRs this year?
The DSLRs and the bridge cameras do very well here. We’re not a Best Buy, and people come here for the more advanced [equipment]. You can buy a point and shoot off the rack, so we’re much more skewed to the more advanced cameras. And we do photofinishing, photo books and calendars, all through a kiosk system and online, and we’ll be promoting [those items and services].
Chris Lydle
Chris’ Camera Center South, Aiken, South Carolina
We’re planning to use more and more quasi Groupon-type promotions. Constant Contact, the e-mail specialists, came up with a program that gives us far more control, and we’ll hang onto a much bigger percentage of our sale. It’s basically an e-mail program, and they have a wonderful way to manage mailing lists, and we do a lot of them. I’m guessing that since I started using them [a few years back] I’ve probably sent more than 700 but less than 1,000 bulk e-mails. They really have the solutions I need for e-mail marketing, and we like e-mail marketing because the cost is minimal.
What will you be promoting for the holidays in those mailings?
I’ll talk more about our services. We’re doing extremely well with large-format printing, but not everybody knows that we do it. We’re doing well with our photo booths, and we’ll emphasize the camera brands that give us a chance to make a fair profit.
Anything from previous years’ successes?
Our biggest promotion and biggest success is the Digital Drop-in Day School—a day’s worth of mini-classes, 10–15 minutes per topic. We usually do them on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. We’ll be doing that, and that’s as far as I’ve gotten.
Andre Adelson
Arista Camera, Bronxville, New York
We’re concentrating on services this year as opposed to products. We’re doing a lot with people who have old movies and videotapes they want to get transferred to DVD, and we’re also making slideshows for people.
People still doing that?
They are. They’re sitting home, watching TV, and if there’s nothing good on, they’ll watch their own stuff.
How do you promote the services?
In an e-mail blast we send out that offers discounts to people who subscribe to the blasts. We’ll pop a sign up in the store, too. Anything’s a better profit than trying to sell a camera.
Including finishing services, enlargements, photos on canvas, photo books?
All of that. On our website we have provisions for people to upload and make their photo books, and we’ll send them directly to their homes. It’s good [for us] year round actually, and it works for [the customers] because it takes a long time to make a photo book. You have to decide which pictures go on which page and things like that, and in the store it becomes a problem for the consumer to spend that much time. So we promote it so they can do it at home at their leisure, and when they’re ready they just place the order.
Will you be promoting much in the way of cameras?
The camera companies themselves will do the promotions. I carry the cameras here; it’s almost like a commodity. People basically know what they want when they walk in. If they don’t, we can answer questions and help pick out a model that’s for them, but we don’t have to sell them on the idea of buying a camera. They need one, they walk in.
