Filed under: Competitive strategy, Marketing and advertising, Best Buy (BBY)

Ideal Purchase, Inc. (NYSE: BBY) continues to be the innovator in the consumer electronics space. The next time you saunter into an airport and plop out your laptop and cellphone, you may see a bright yellow Ideal Purchase Express kiosk nearby.

That’s right — Ideal Buy is testing a concept to have the most-needed gadgets and accessories available for retail sale at an automated kiosk in your nearest airport terminal. Get ready to whip out that credit card.

If you forgot to charge that cellphone (oh no!) or need a last-minute Christmas gift after you arrive to the airport, you might soon be in luck. Initially, Best Purchase is going to have these kiosks available at 12 major international airports in the U.S. to test the concept. The pricing? Very similar to what you’d find in a typical Ideal Buy retail location (read: cheap). This will be a comfort to those who are tired of paying those over-inflated fees at airport shops.

These kiosks will match the wish list of every gadget-hungry traveler: MP3 players, digital cameras, unlocked cell phones, portable gaming systems and all kinds of chargers for all your electronic toys. Want some headphones for the plane? You’ll find those as well. Even Ideal Buy gift cards will be available — the one-size-fits-all holiday gift. This is a very innovative approach by Best Purchase to grow sales in a captive audience, and should provide a decent lift to upcoming holiday season sales.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Consumer experience, Wal-Mart (WMT), Marketing and advertising

This post is one in a series on prominent company nicknames. See all 25, and share your thoughts and memories about Walley World below in the comments.

When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) began transforming from a regional discount chain to a national retail powerhouse in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the company caught the attention of consumers and business critics alike. The company has never been the same since, and after its meteoric rise in the 1990s, it is easily deserving of its alter ego, Walley World. Why, might you ask?

The term comes from a fictional amusement park in the 1983 comedy film National Lampoon’s Vacation. The sprawling amusement park, which the Griswold family travels cross country for, turns out to be shut. This, of course, makes hilarity ensue as Chevy Chase’s character hijacks the entire park to make sure his family has a good time after the disastrous journey to get there.

The sheer size and “everything under the sun” mentality of the park set the tone for Wal-Mart to be called “Walley World” soon thereafter. This was probably due to a comparison to the amusement park’s enormous size as well as the parking lot depicted in the film — which resembles a cement desert without end.

And thus, the real retail embodiment of Walley World was born. The name still sticks with millions of consumers to today. Even some of my own family never use the term “Wal-Mart” — its Walley World (always). The world’s largest retailer might even seem to some to be more like an amusement park these days, with hordes of bargain-happy shoppers, a quarter-mile walk from the parking lot to the store and everything from tires to bananas to flat-screen TVs all under one roof.

Is Wal-Mart really being injured by the Walley World moniker? One would think not, but then again, the retailer’s PR folks probably don’t like it or the mental association it creates. Still, it’s an adventure when one travels from home to Walley World. It’s just a shopping trip for $1 plastic clothes hangers when you make the beeline from home to Wal-Mart, right?

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Marketing and advertising, McDonald’s (MCD)

This post is one in a series on prominent company nicknames. See all 25, and share your thoughts and memories about Mickey D’s below in the comments.

Should you ever doubt that I was born and bred a United States citizen, let the following anecdote erase all skepticism. Flashing back to 1983 for a moment, we find my 2-year-old self in my dad’s old Plymouth station wagon. We’re on the way to pick up my sister from Montessori school, and I’m riding in the front seat (a flagrant violation of my mother’s car-seat rule, not to mention Ohio say law). From my shotgun perch, I have a clear view of the windshield wiper knob for the first time … and, to my toddler’s eye, the button atop this lever screams one message: McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD).

That’s right; I thought that the familiar wiper-fluid icon, with its two arches fanning out from one central stem, was somehow related to America’s premier fast-food export. My quickly formed hypothesis went something along the lines of, In case of emergency, press here, and the Golden Arches will appear on the horizon. (Are you listening, automakers? The future is now!) As formative childhood memories go, this one blissfully passes up Freud and heads straight to Jung.

It might sound like an exaggeration, but the Golden Arches are nothing if not archetypal. Sure, there are other notable arches in the world; the Gateway Arch in St. Louis springs to mind, as does France’s Arc de Triomphe, and the reasonable facsimile thereof in New York City’s Washington Square Park. But, I ask you, is there another parabola in the world that so effortlessly communicates the same message in Beijing as it does in Cincinnati?

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Golden Arches are equally welcome in both locales. In anticipation of the 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing passed strict regulations to control outdoor signage. Tragically, no fewer than 30 Golden Arches were among the casualties. (Prepare yourself now to see footage of American tourists stumbling blindly through the Olympic host city in search of their beloved Massive Macs.)

Despite their gilded hue, the Golden Arches themselves do not guarantee Midas-like success. Remember the Arch Deluxe? The short-lived burger, launched in 1996, was meant to appeal to an adult audience with more refined taste buds than the Happy Meal set. The “upscale” sandwich was easily distinguishable by its split-top roll and its higher price tag, as well as a questionable, $200-million advertising campaign that featured picky children trashing the burger’s taste. (And, for the record, it was marketed as the McDeluxe en francais.) Needless to state, McDonald’s found out the hard way that adults with refined taste buds aren’t willing to shell out for an extra-pricey fast-food burger, no matter what kind of iconic American image is slapped on it.

And that wasn’t the only occasion where McDonald’s was hoist upon the petard of its own symbolism. In 2004 — the same year that Morgan Spurlock’s documentary SuperSize Me became a word-of-mouth success — the fast-food chain found itself beset by criticism for its worldwide dissemination of nutrition-free menu items. Eager to ditch its image as a fat-shoveling icon of corporate indifference, McDonald’s stripped the Golden Arches from its U.K. advertising, and replaced the familiar “M” with a golden question mark and the phrase “McDonald’s. But Not as You Know It.”

Oh, McDonald’s. You can try to hide the voluptuous curves of your arches behind a flirty question mark, or mask your identity under the leafy cover of fast-food salads, but we still recognize you. And you know what? For the most part, we kinda like you anyway. Although I still can’t wash my windshield without developing a craving for French fries, it’s just impossible to hold a grudge against the Golden Arches.

Elizabeth Harrow is an analyst and financial writer in the research department at Schaeffer’s Investment Research. She is featured in the weekly video series Option Basics on SchaeffersResearch.com.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Products and services, Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising

This post is one in a series on prominent company nicknames. See all 25, and share your thoughts and memories about Fiat below in the comments.

Sometime in the 1970s, some wag dubbed the Fiat Fix It Again Tony, because at the time the Italian cars were awful — they were built with cheap Russian steel that rusted easily. Their reputation among American consumers has never recovered.

“Modern Fiats are actually pretty respectable thanks to modernization of materials and manufacturing processes, unfortunately most Americans still think of the old phrase ‘Fix It Again Tony’ because Fiat has not sold automobiles in North America since 1982, and therefore that’s the last Fiat anyone there has usually seen,” according to the Urban Dictionary.

Maybe Fiat’s absence from the U.S. market isn’t a bad thing. Writing in BusinessWeek, Helen Walters described the Fiat Punto as being riddled with design flaws, including one that’s a safety hazard. “As it happens, I’m not in the market to buy a vehicle,” she writes. “But if I was then the Punto wouldn’t make it anywhere on the list.”

Looks like the old Fiat joke is not going away anytime soon.

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Search

Wikipedia is a great source of information, and it’s getting bigger each day. If you’re like me, you’d be hard pressed to go a day without looking something up on Wikipedia. But sometimes you might not have Internet access — devastating, I know! — and you still need to know whether there’s a grammatically correct sentence made up entirely of the word “buffalo.” Well, it’s a good thing there’s Wikitaxi, an offline Wikipedia app.

With Wikitaxi, you can snag the entire database of Wikipedia — or, if you’re pressed for bandwidth, the Simple English version is a lot smaller — and read it offline on your Windows machine. It comes with a separate importer app that you can point at a database, and then you can use the main Wikitaxi app to run searches on it. Those clever people at Lifehacker advocate that you carry it around on a USB drive: then you can prove that buffalo thing to your friends at a moment’s notice!

[via Lifehacker]

Read

Share This

Share This