Dick Smith electronics to rebrand with focus on demystifying technology
Dick Smith Sydney Central
Australian retailer Dick Smith has unveiled the beginnings of a gradual rebrand involving a multi-million dollar marketing campaign and restructure of its media strategy.
Dick Smith will work with its new creative agency Ideaworks and seek to reposition the electronics store as one that can demystify technology for ordinary Australians.
CEO Nick Abboud spoke out about the turn-around of the $1.3bn business and 44-year-old brand for the first time since Woolworths sold the company to Anchorage in November at the opening of a flagship store Sydney Central in the Westfield Pitt Street Mall this week. Another new store was also opened at Lilydale in Melbourne yesterday.
As well as increasing its online offering and number of stores from 323 to 400 across Australia and New Zealand over the next three years, Abboud said there will be a marketing campaign that follows intensive research conducted through an online customer community over three months. Abboud said the campaign will have a focus on price, customer service and how to get the best out of technology.
Director of marketing Neil Merola told Mumbrella: 
“Our customer research talked about really aligning our offer to families and demystifying technology for mums and for dads.”
Creative agency Ideaworks signed onto Dick Smith’s advertising account around three months ago, Merola said.
“They’re very entrepreneurial, very nimble and flexible, and very customer focused, so they were traits that we really valued so we’ve bunkered down with them.
“The marketing campaign’s evolving so we’ll just keep seeing it over the next few months.
“We’re still working through the enormous amount of customer research that we have so in time we will re-launch.”
Abboud said Dick Smith is currently the only retailer of its kind to distribute a weekly catalogue to six million customers.
He added:”We spend millions on marketing every year and we have restructured our whole media campaign. I think the customer has been confused over time because there’s been a number of different strategies over the last couple of years but we are going to be very focused.
“We’re not going to dabble into areas that maybe our competitors are jumping into, we’re going to be very focused on something that you’re seeing in this store, and we’ll be very good at it, and our customers won’t be confused about our message.”
Megan Reynolds
“Demystifying technology for mums and for dads”
Are parents that dumb that they don’t know how to use technology? I don’t think so. It’s pretty rare to find someone who doesn’t know how to turn on a computer or use their mobile phone.
Stranger still, why would even want to be targeting this market? Shouldn’t they be getting the young ones in early to make them life long customers? JB HIFI is far too expensive nowadays and I’ve been tending to go online for things, but they’re still my first port of call when I need something in a hurry. Shouldn’t Dick Smith be trying to combat that? This seems like a mess…
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great marketing idea if they can pull it off.
Was in a Telstra store today. A bunch of 2-somethings trying to sell and “customer service” a stream of 45+ both genders – I had to wait a while so got to people watch.
The customers were driving the CSOs insane – they did not even have words or language for what they were trying to purchase “thingamebobs”, “gizmos” “whatchcallits” were bandied about liberally, while the COS tried not to roll their eyes and be tooo patronising. I said to my CSO, when I got to the top of the line with my errant ipad : ” look, this stuff did not even exist 5 years ago, so we really dont completely know what we are doing – not like you digital natives!” She was at least gracious enough to smile and sort of agree, So if DSE can be the “go to” place for people who what “thingames” and “something that connects to something that my daughter sent me to buy”, then there is a market to be tapped for sure
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This starts with an employee and brand culture before any campaign considerations. Their promise in this positioning is not matched by my local DS store employees. Lets see how they go…
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You said it Mack. It’s one thing to promise – but the service needs to deliver otherwise it’s yet more money poured into the DS money pit for nothing.
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