Category: Veddatorial
Setting The Tone
By Dan Vedda More years ago than I like to remember—call it post-Woodstock but pre-Yamaha DX7—I worked for a national retail chain when it was the country’s largest retailer. It was the first time I worked for a business with so many employees, so many managers and so many individual stores. The opportunity to observe [...]
Melting Pot
By Dan Vedda Over the last couple of months, we’ve been talking about transforming our industry’s retail approach a la Walt Disney (creating a thorough and engaging experience that addresses the full range of consumers) and finding a new demographic (customers who don’t fit the traditional pigeonholes of school music, pros and teens). This month, [...]
New Demographic
By Dan Vedda Last month, I talked about Walt Disney and his relentless focus on the customer experience. I think that his approach can be applied to the way we present the music products industry. As we do that, though, it raises another question: Just who is our customer, anyway? I think that a number [...]
WHAT WOULD WALT DO?
By Dan Vedda I’ve been thinking about Disney a lot lately. Not the company but, rather, Walt himself. It’s easy to quibble about the current state and offerings of the entertainment behemoth, but the House That Walt Built sprang from the genius of a man who was in tune with his times, was always looking [...]
Mapquest
By Dan Vedda In December, word leaked out (in the same way that you can refer to a burst pipe as a leak) that the Uberstore (aka Guitar Center) had sent a letter to all its suppliers announcing a change in its position regarding manufacturer Minimum Advertised Price policies. In effect, it said, “We don’t [...]
Christmas Wrap
By Dan Vedda We’ve closed the door on Christmas and stand poised to jump into a new year. I’m a little shy about predicting the year ahead. But, what I saw through the Christmas selling season gives me hope. Although sales figures met my conservative expectations, I’m more excited about a glimpse of trends that [...]
Order up
By Dan Vedda As I write this, we’ve just passed Black Friday and the much-vaunted Cyber Monday. Reports that sales were slightly higher than expected in the brick-and-mortar retail sector, and as much as 18 percent higher online, can be taken at face value, although the results raise questions about what the data truly means. [...]
